Brief reference was made in a previous chapter to woman's great function of choosing the fathers of the future. Here we must discuss, at due length, her choice of a companion for life. It is repeatedly argued, by critics of any new idea, that the eugenist, in his concern for the race, is blind to the natural interests and needs of the individual; that "we are all to be married to each other by the police," as an irresponsible jester has declared; that the sanctities of love are to be profaned or its imperatives defied. Even serious and responsible persons assume that there is here a necessary antagonism between the interests of the race and those of the individual,—that the girl would, presumably, choose one man to be her love and companion and partner for life, but another man as the father of her children. There are those whom it always rejoices to discover what they regard as antinomies and contradictions in Nature, and they verily prefer to suppose that there is in things this inherent viciousness, which sets eternal war between one set of obligations, one set of ideals, and another. But Nature is not made according to the pattern of our misunderstandings.

We have seen that all individuals are constructed by Nature for the future. We are certainly right to regard them as also ends in themselves, but Nature conceived and fashioned them with reference to the future. In so far as marriage has a natural sanction and foundation—than which nothing is more certain—we may therefore expect to discover that the interests of the individual and of the race are indeed one. In a word, the man who is most worthy to be chosen as a father of the future is always the most worthy and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is also the most individually suitable, to be chosen as a partner and companion for life. Let the girl choose wisely and well for her own sake and in her own interests. If, indeed, she does so, the future will be almost invariably safeguarded.

Of course it is to be understood that we are here discussing general principles. Everyone knows that cases exist, and must continue to exist, where an opposition between the interests of the race and those of the individual cannot be denied. Some utterly unsuspected hereditary strain of insanity, for instance, may show itself or be discovered in the ancestry of an individual to whom a member of the opposite sex has already become devoted. I fully admit the existence of such exceptions, but it must be insisted that they are exceptions, and that they do not at all invalidate the general truth that if a girl really chooses the best man, she is choosing the best father for her children.

It is when the girl chooses for something other than natural quality that the future is liable to be betrayed. But the point to be insisted upon is that it is far more worth her while to choose for natural quality than for any other considerations. The argument of this chapter is that it will not in the long run be worth the girl's while to be beguiled by a man's money, his position or his prospects, since all of these, without the one thing needful, will ultimately fail her.

The truth is that very few girls realize how intimate and urgent and inevitable and unintermittent are the conditions of married life. It requires imagination, of course, to understand these things without experience. A girl observes a friend who has made what is called "a good marriage"; she goes to the friend's house, and sees her the triumphant mistress of a large establishment; she sees her friend at the theatre, meets her escorted by her husband at this place and that; hears of her holidays abroad, covets her jewelry, and she thinks how delightful it must be. She knows nothing at all of the realities; she sees only externals, and she is misled. Whenever thus misled she is beguiled into marrying a man for any other reason than that his personal qualities compel her love, it is her seniors who are to blame for not having enlightened her. Such a girl shall be enlightened if her eyes fall on these pages.

Happiness does not consist in external things at all. This is not to deny that external things may largely contribute to happiness if its primal conditions be first satisfied. Failing those primal conditions, externals are a mockery and a burden. In the case of the vast majority of married people we see only what they choose that we shall see. Almost everyone is concerned with keeping up appearances. Things may be and very often are what they appear, but very often they are not. Any woman of nice feeling is very much concerned to keep up appearances in the matter of her marriage. A few or none may guess her secret, but whatever we see, it is what we do not see—no matter how close our friendship may be—that determines the success or failure of marriage. The moments that really count are just those which we do not witness, and such moments are many in married life, or should be. If the marriage is what it ought to be, there is a vital communion, grave and gay, which occupies every available part of life. Only the persons immediately concerned really know how much of this they have or, if they have it not, what they have in its place. But we may be well assured that, as every married person knows, it is the personal qualities that matter everything in this most intimate sphere of life, and naught else matters at all. When the girl marries so as to become possessed of any and every kind of external advantage, but there is that in the man which is unlovely or which she, at any rate, cannot love, her marriage will assuredly be a failure. As we have occasion to observe every day, she will be glad to jump at any chance of sacrificing all externals, where essentials thus fail her.

This is only to preach once again the simple doctrine that a girl is to marry a man not for what he has but for what he is. If, as a eugenist, I am thinking at this time as much of the future as of the present, the advice is none the less trustworthy. It is certain that this advice is no less necessary than it ever was. Everyone knows how the standard of luxury has risen during the last few decades, both in England and in the United States. All history lies if this be not an evil omen for any civilization. It means, among other things, that more effectively than ever the forces of suggestion and imitation and social pressure are being brought to bear, to vitiate the young girl's natural judgment, deceiving her into the supposition that these things which seem to make other people so happy are the first that must be sought by her. If only she had the merest inkling of what the doctor and the lawyer and the priest could tell her about the inner life of many of the owners of these well-groomed and massaged faces! We hear much of the failure of marriage, but surely the amazing thing is its measure of success under our careless and irresponsible methods. For happily married people do not require intrigues nor divorces, nor do they furnish subject matter for scandal. It is because people do not marry for their personal qualities, but for things which, personal qualities failing, will soon turn to dust and ashes in their mouths, that their disappointed lives seek satisfaction in all these unsatisfactory and imperfect ways. As we all know, social practice differs in say, France and England, in such matters as this; and there are those who tell us that the method whereby natural inclinations are ignored is highly successful, and has just as much to be said for it as has the more specially Anglo-Saxon method of allowing the young people to choose each other. It is incomprehensible how any observer of contemporary France, its divorce rate and its birth-rate, can uphold such a contention. On the contrary, we may be more and more convinced that Nature knows her business, and that marriage, which is a natural institution, should be based, in each case, upon her indications.

There is need here for a reform which is more radical and fundamental than any that can be named, just because it deals with our central social institution, and concerns the natural composition and qualities of the next generation. I mean that reform in education which will direct itself towards rightly moulding and favouring the worthy choice of each other by young people, and especially the worthy choice of men by women. It will further come to be seen that everything which vitiates this choice—as, for instance, the economic dependence of women, great excess of women in a community, the inheritance of large fortunes—is ultimately to be condemned on that final ground, if on no other.

But whilst these sociological propositions may be laid down, let us see what can be said in the present state of things by way of advice to the girl into whose hands this book may fall. Perhaps it may be permitted to use the more direct form of address.

You may have been told that where poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window.[15] You may have heard it said that so and so has made a good marriage because her husband has a large income. You may be inclined to judge the success of marriage by what you see. I warn you solemnly that the worth or unworth of your marriage, the success or failure of your life will depend, far more than upon all other things put together, upon the personal qualities of the man you choose.

If these be not good in themselves, your marriage will fail, certainly; even if they be good in themselves your marriage will fail, probably, unless they also be nicely adapted to your own character and tastes and temperament and needs. There are thus two distinct requirements; the first absolutely cardinal, the second very nearly so. You are utterly wrong if you suppose that the first of these can be ignored: if your husband is not a worthy man, you are doomed. And you are almost certainly wrong if you suppose that lack of community in tastes and in interests, in objects of admiration and adoration does not matter. But let us consider what are the factors of the man for which a girl does choose.

For what, if it comes to that, does a man choose? Here is Herbert Spencer's reply to that question:—"The truth is that out of the many elements uniting in various proportions, to produce in a man's breast the complex emotion we call love, the strongest are those produced by physical attractions; the next in order of strength are those produced by moral attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions; and even these are dependent less on acquired knowledge than on natural faculty—quickness, wit, insight." It will probably be agreed that, on the whole, this analysis, which is certainly true in the direction it refers to, is also true in the converse direction. The girl admires a man for physical qualities, including what may be called the physical virtues, like energy and courage. She rates highly certain moral attractions, such as unselfishness and chivalry, but perhaps she attaches far more value to intellectual attractions than the man does in her case, doubtless because they are more distinctively masculine.

No doubt, in this order of importance both sexes are consulting the eugenic end if they knew it, as Spencer, indeed, pointed out nearly half a century ago. The passage from which we have quoted he thus continues:—

But here it will be well to consider and meet a possible criticism. This is none the less necessary because there is a very common type of mind which listens to the enunciation of principles not in order to grasp them, but in order to point out exceptions. Such people forget that before one can profitably observe exceptions to a principle or a natural law it is necessary first of all to know rightly and wholly what the principle is. Now in this particular case our principle is that the cause of the future must not be betrayed, and the essential argument of this chapter is that faithfulness to the cause of the future does not involve, as is commonly supposed, any denial of the interests of the present, since, as I maintain, he who is best worth choosing as a partner for life is in general best worth choosing as a father of the future.

Now what one must here reckon with is the existence of individual cases,—much commoner doubtless in the imagination of critics than in reality, but nevertheless worthy of study—where a man may gain a woman's love of the real kind and may return it, and yet may be unfit for parenthood. The converse case is equally likely, but here we are concerned especially with the interests of the woman. She is, shall we say, a nurse in a sanatorium for consumptives or, to suppose a case more critical and complicated still, she may herself be a patient in such a sanatorium. There she meets another patient with whom she falls in love. Now these two may be well fitted to make each other happy for so long as fate permits, but if the interests of the future are to be considered they should not become parents. I must not be taken as here assenting to the old view, dating from a time when nothing was known of the disease, which regards consumption as hereditary. It is evident that quite apart from that question the couple of whom we are thinking should not become parents. It is possible that the disease may be completely cured, and the situation will then be altered. But only too often the patient's life will be much shortened and children will be left fatherless; they also in certain circumstances will run a grave risk of being infected by living with consumptive parents. If in the case we are supposing the woman be also consumptive, it is extremely probable that motherhood on her part would aggravate and hasten the course of the disease, it being well-known that pregnancy has an extremely unfavourable influence on consumption in the majority of cases.

Many other parallel cases may be imagined. Woman's love, based perhaps mainly upon the maternal instinct of tenderness, may be called forth by a man who suffers from, shall we say, hæmophilia or the bleeding disease. He may be in every way the best of men, worthy to make any woman happy; but if he becomes the father of a son, it will probably be to inflict great cruelty upon his child.

What, in a word, are we to say of such cases as these? There is here a real opposition, as it would appear, between the interests of the present and the interests of the future. But the answer is that, just because, and just in so far as, human beings are provident and responsible and worthy of the name of human beings, the opposition can be practically solved. Not for anything must we betray the cause of the unborn, but marriage does not necessarily involve parenthood, and the right course—the profoundly right and deeply moral course—in such cases as these, is marriage without parenthood.

On every hand in the civilized world we now see childless marriages, the number of which incessantly increases; they are an ominous symptom of excessive luxury and other factors of decadence, if history is to be trusted. But it is not permissible for us, without special knowledge, to condemn individuals, whatever we may think of the phenomenon as a whole. Yet convention and prejudice are curious things, and people who are themselves married and deliberately childless, others of both sexes who are unmarried, people who have never raised their voices against themselves or their friends who, though married, are childless, because they have little courage or because they permit compliance with fashion's demands to stifle the best parts of their nature—such people, I say, will actually be found to protest, with the sort of canting righteousness which does its best to smirch the Right, against this doctrine, Marry, but do not have children, as the rule of life in the cases under discussion. Nevertheless, this is the moral doctrine; this is the right fruit of knowledge, and knowledge will more and more be applied to this high end, the service alike of the present and the future. We must not allow our minds to be bullied out of just reasoning because the possibility of marriage without parenthood is often abused. All forms of knowledge, like all other forms of power, may be used or may be abused. Knowledge has no moral sign attached to it, but neither has it any immoral sign attached to it. The power to control parenthood is neither good nor evil, but like any other power may serve either good or evil. Dynamite may cause an explosion which buries a hundred men in a living grave, or it may blast the rock which buries them and set them free. The man of science is false to his creed and his cause if he declares that there is any order of knowledge or any kind of power which were better unknown or unavailable. For many years past we have been told that the power to control parenthood is wicked, flying in the face of providence, interfering with the order of Nature—as if every act worthy of the human name were not an interference with the order of Nature, as Nature is conceived by fools; and even to-day the churches, violently differing from each other in the region of incomprehensibles, are at least agreed in anathematizing the knowledge and the power to control parenthood. The reply to them is the demonstration, here made, of the fact that this knowledge may be used for no less splendid a purpose than to make possible the happiness and mutual ennoblement of individual lives in cases where otherwise such a consummation would have been impossible without betrayal of the life of this world to come.

There is another class of cases to which convenient reference may here be made. The solution to be found in childless marriage, for many cases, does not apply to those in which there is present disease due to living organisms, microbes or protozoa which, by the mere act of drinking from an infected cup, by kissing and so forth, may be passed from the sick to the sound. So far as these modes of infection are concerned, such a supposed case as that of the nurse and the consumptive patient who fall in love with each other comes into this category. But infection of that kind is preventable. In the case, however, of the terrible diseases to which reference has been made in a previous chapter, we must clearly understand that it is not only the future which is in danger, and that therefore the solution of childless marriage does not apply. Here the danger is irremovable from the physical essentia of the marriage itself, and in such a case, no matter how high the personal qualities of the man who may, for instance, have been infected by accident in the course of his duty as a doctor, even childless marriage other than the mariage blanc must be, at any rate, postponed until the disease has been cured.

It is to be hoped that the reader will not regard these last two points, which have had to be dealt with at some length, as irrelevant. They are not strictly part of the general proposition that a girl should marry a man for his personal qualities, but they are surely necessary as practical comments upon that proposition as it will work out in real life. We may now return to our main contention.

In our quotation from Herbert Spencer we may notice the significant assertion that amongst intellectual attractions it is natural faculty, quickness, wit and insight, rather than acquired knowledge, that a man admires in a woman. In considering that point the somewhat hazardous assertion was ventured upon that the woman rates intellectual attractions in the man higher than he does in her. One has indeed heard it stated that a man marries for beauty and a woman for brains. A statement so brief cannot be accurate in such a case. But we may insist upon the contrast between acquired knowledge and natural faculty. Spencer was no doubt right in believing that man values the natural faculty rather than the acquired knowledge. A woman no doubt does so too. If she admires a man for being an encyclopædia, it is only, one hopes, because she admires the natural qualities of studiousness, perseverance and memory which his knowledge involves. Nor would she be long in finding out whether his knowledge is digested, and the capacity to digest it, remember, is a natural faculty.

The reader who remembers our principle that the individual exists for the future will not fail to see what we are driving at. Directly we study in any critical way the causes of attraction among the sexes, we see that under healthy conditions, unvitiated by convention or money, it is always the inborn rather than the acquired that counts. If Spencer had cared to pursue his point half a century ago, he had the key to it in his hands. Youth prefers the natural to the acquired qualities.

Nature, greatest of match-makers, has so constructed youth because she is a Eugenist, and because she knows that it is the natural qualities and not the acquired ones which are transmitted to offspring.

And now it may be shown that this fact wholly consorts with our contention that there is no antinomy between the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the race in the marriage choice. For the race it is only the natural qualities of its future parents that matter, for only these are transmissible. From the strictly eugenic point of view, therefore, the girl should be counselled to choose her mate, not merely on the ground of his personal qualities but, more strictly still, on the ground of those personal qualities which are natural and not acquired. And my last point is that these qualities, which are alone of lasting consequence to the race, alone will be of lasting consequence to her during her married life. Veneers, acquirements, technical facilities, knowledge of languages, encyclopædic information, elegance of speech and even of conventional manners—all the things which, in our rough classification, we may call acquired, may attract or please or impress her for a time, but when the ultimate reckoning is made she will find that they are less than the dust in the balance. I do not know how and where to find for my words the emphasis with which it would be so easy to endow them if, instead of addressing an unseen and strange audience, one were counselling one's own daughter. I should say to her, for instance, "My dear, be not deceived. He dresses elegantly, I know, and makes himself quite nice to look at. Yet it is not his clothes that you will have to live with, but himself; and the question is what do his clothes mean? It is his nature that you will have to live with. What fact of his nature do they stand for? Is it that he is vain and selfish, preferring to spend his money upon himself and upon the exterior of his person rather than upon others and upon the adornment of his mind; or is it that he has fine natural taste, a sense of beauty and harmony and quiet dignity in external things?" The answer to these questions involves his wife's happiness. How strange that though no girl will marry a man because she is attracted by the elegance of his false teeth, yet she will often be deceived into admiring other things which are just as much acquired and just as little likely to afford her permanent satisfaction as the products of his dentist's work-room! If only she realized that these other things, though nice to look at, are no more himself than a well-fitting dental plate.

Or again: "You like his talk; he strikes you as well versed in human affairs; his knowledge of men and things impresses you; he has travelled and can talk easily of what he has seen, and his voice is elegant and can be heard in many tongues. But if he is going to say bitter things to you, will the facility of his diction make them less bitter? If he is a fool in his heart—and indeed the heart alone is the residence of folly or wisdom—do you think that he will be a fool the less for venting his folly in seven languages rather than in one? I quite understand your admiring his cleverness; people who study the subject tell us, you know, that a woman admires in a man things which are more characteristic of men than of women, and that men's admiration of women is based upon the same good principle. But in this bargain men have the best of it because the most characteristic thing in woman is tenderness, and the most characteristic thing in man is cleverness; and which do you think is the better to live with? What is the virtue in cleverness coupled with, for instance, a malicious tongue? What is the virtue in clever things if he says them at your expense? The vital thing for you is, what are the uses to which he puts his knowledge and capacities? That he knows the ways of the world may impress you, but does he know them to admire them? And if so, where does he stand compared with another, who is less versed and versatile, but who, as your heart tells you, would hate the ways of the world if he did know them?" ...

Indeed, I seem to see that one cannot adequately write a book on Womanhood without including in it somewhere a statement of what manhood is and ought to be. Surely one of our duties to girlhood is to teach it the elemental truths of manhood. Such teaching must recognize the facts which modern psychology perceives more clearly every day, and it must combine that knowledge with the eternal truths of morality, which are so intensely real and practical in the great issues of life, such as this. The great fact which modern psychology has discovered is that intellect is less important, and emotion more important than we used to suppose; that knowledge, as we lately observed, is non-moral, and may be for good or for evil; that cleverness is merely cleverness, and may serve God or mammon; that it is the nature of the man or the woman which determines the influence and the uses of education. A girl should know something of what I have elsewhere called the transmutation of sex as it shows itself in the higher as distinguished from the lower types of manhood: she should know that it is good for a youth to spend his energy in visible ways and in the light of day; there is the less likelihood that it is being spent otherwise. She should prefer the man who is visibly active and who keeps his mind and body moving; she should know, as the school boy should know, that the capacity to smoke and drink really proves nothing as regards manhood. Doubtless there is some courage required in learning to smoke, and so much, but it is not much, is to the smoker's credit; but for the rest, smoking and drinking are simply forms of self-indulgence, and though they are doubtless very excusable and are often practised by splendid men, they are of no virtue in themselves. Further, they are open to the fundamental objection that they lessen the measure of a man's self-mastery. Women should set a high standard in such matters as these.

To take the case of smoking, very few smokers realize, in the first place, how much money they expend. It is money which, if not spent, would appreciably contribute to the cost of house-keeping in not a few cases. Many a man who says he cannot afford to marry spends on tobacco and alcohol a sum quite sufficient to turn the scale. It will be argued that the smoking brings rest and peace, that it soothes, aids digestion, and so forth. But the non-smoker is not in need of these assistances: it is only the smoker who requires to smoke for these purposes. On this point I have said, in the volume of personal hygiene which this present work is meant to succeed, all that really requires to be said. It was there pointed out that nicotine doubtless produces secondary products in the blood which require a further dose of the nicotine as an antidote to them. Thus there is initiated a vicious circle, the details of which have been fully worked out in the case of opium, or rather, morphia. All the good results which are obtained from smoking are essentially of the nature of neutralizing the secondary effects of previous smoking. Here, then, is the scientific argument for the girl's hand if she proposes to deal with her lover on this point.

It may be added that the writer can now quote personal experience in favour of his advice. He smoked incessantly for fourteen years—from seventeen to thirty-one—his quantum being five ounces in all per week—of the strongest Egyptian cigarettes and the strongest pipe tobacco procurable. The practice did him no observable harm whatever. When he wrote the paragraph on "How to control one's smoking," in the book referred to, he was only wishing that he could control his own. At last he got disgusted with himself and stopped altogether. Personally he is neither better nor worse, but he is buying books in proportion to the money formerly wasted on tobacco, and perhaps the change is worth while. The girl who reads this book may tell her lover with confidence that it is quite possible to stop smoking, and that after a little while the craving wholly disappears. If he has been a really confirmed, systematic smoker, he may have a very uncomfortable three weeks after he stops, but soon after that the time will come when he can stay in a room where others are smoking and not even desire to join them, which he could never have done before. He will have the advantage that he is definitely less likely to die of cancer of the mouth, more especially cancer of the tongue. That is a point which will affect his wife as well as himself. He will save a quite remarkable sum of money, and since object lessons are very valuable, he may follow the suggestion to lay it out in the form of books, as time goes on, though perhaps my reader can give him better advice from the point of view of the future housekeeper.

Of course there is the point of view expressed in a poem of Mr. Kipling's:

"A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke."

If a man takes that point of view he is not good enough for a woman, I think; she may remember Dogberry, Take no note of him but let him go ... and thank God she is rid of a—— fool.

Certainly, I am not saying anything which will be grateful to all ears, but while we are at it, and since this book is written in the interests of women, I must say what I believe. I counsel the girl to stop her lover's smoking; a thousandfold more strongly would I counsel her to stop his drinking. In a former volume on eugenics, some of the effects of parental drinking have been dealt with at length, and that subject need not be returned to here. But also from the point of view of the individual, a girl may be counselled to stop her lover's drinking. An excellent eugenic motto for a girl, as my friend Canon Horsley pointed out in discussing my paper on this subject read before the Society for the Study of Inebriety in 1909, is "the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine."

There are always plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, nay, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all others. I am now addressing the girl who may become a wife, and I tell her most solemnly that from her point of view she cannot afford to laugh at the teetotaler; and if she can stop her lover's drinking, whether he drinks much or little, she will do well for him and herself. She should know what the effect of alcohol is upon a man, and she should have imagination enough to realize that his hot breath, coming unwelcome, will not be more palatable in the future for its flavouring of whisky. It may be admitted that in saying all this the interests of the future are perhaps paramount in my mind. I am trying to do a service to the principle, "Protect parenthood from alcohol," which I advocate as the first and most urgent motto for the real temperance reformer. Yet the question of parenthood may be entirely left out of consideration, and even so the advice here given to the girl about to choose a husband—alas, that only a small proportion of maidenhood can be in that fortunate state, which is yet the right and natural one!—is warranted and more than warranted. We may go so far as to declare that it is a great duty, laid upon the young womanhood of civilization, to protect itself and the future, and to serve its own contemporary manhood, by taking up this attitude towards alcohol. Would that this great missionary enterprise were now unanimously undertaken by these most effective and cogent of missionaries, whose own happiness so largely depends upon its success!

Of course it should not be necessary for any man to set forth, for the instruction of girlhood, the qualities which it should value in men. All who train and teach girlhood and form its ideals should devote themselves scarcely less to this than to the inculcation of high ideals for girlhood itself; yet it is not done. We do not yet recognize the supreme importance of the marriage choice for the present and for the future.

Fortunately, if Nature alone gets a fair chance, she teaches the girl that a man should "play the game," and should not be afraid of "having a go," that of the two classes into which, as one used to tell a little girl, people are divided—those who "stick to it," and those who do not—the former are the worthy for her. But Nature is specially handicapped by stupid convention, not least in Anglo-Saxon countries, as regards a woman's estimation of tenderness in a man. The parental instinct with its correlate emotion of tenderness, is the highest of existing things, and though it is less characteristic of men than of women, it is none the less supreme when men exhibit it. In days to come, when women can choose, as they should be able to choose to-day, they may well be counselled to use as a touchstone of their suitor's quality that line of Wordsworth, "Wisdom doth live with children round her knees." A man who thinks that "rot" is rot, or soon will be.

But in the minds of men and women there is a half implicit assumption that tenderness is incompatible with manliness. "Let not women's weapons, water-drops, stain my man's cheeks," says Lear. But it is quite possible for a man to be manly and yet tender, and to the highest type of women it is the combination of strength and tenderness in a man that appeals beyond aught else.

It has always seemed to the present writer that the followers of Christ have done him far less than justice in insisting upon one aspect of his character disproportionately with another. They speak of him as the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild "; they tend to describe him as almost or wholly effeminate; and the representations of him in art, with small, feminine and conspicuously un-Jewish features, with long feminine hair and the hands of a consumptive woman, join with sacred poetry in furthering this impression. Nothing can be truer than that he was tender, and that he had a passion for childhood and realized, as we may dare to say, its divinity, as only the very few in any age have done. But this "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," was also he whose blazing words against established iniquity and hypocrisy constitute him the supreme exemplar not only of love but of moral indignation, and of a sublime invective which has been equalled not even by Dante at his highest. We forget, perhaps, when we use such a phrase as "whited sepulchre," that we are quoting the untamable fierceness, the courage, fatal and vital, of the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," who was murdered not for loving children, but for hating established wickedness. Why have Christians not recognized that it is this perhaps unexampled combination of strength and tenderness which makes their Founder worthy for all time to be regarded as the Highest of Mankind?

One more counsel to the girl who can choose. It is contained in the saying of Marcus Aurelius that the worth of a man may be measured by the worth of the things to which he devotes his life.

We must now pass to consider the sociological fact that, under present conditions, the sole use of this chapter for a very large proportion of women can merely consist in suggesting to them that they are better unmarried than married without love. It is not possible for them to exercise the great function of choice which is theirs by natural right. Evil and ominous of more evil are whatever facts deprive woman of this her birthright.

In my volume introductory to Eugenics I have dealt at length with marriage from that point of view. Here our concern is with the individual woman, and though neither in theory nor in practice can we entirely dissociate the question of the future from that of the individual's needs, it is necessary here to discuss the present conditions of marriage in the civilized world, from the woman's point of view. We have to ask ourselves how these conditions act in selecting women from the ranks of the unmarried; whether the transition proceeds from random chance, or whether there is a selection in certain definite directions, and if so, what directions? We have to ask whether different women would pass into the ranks of the married if the conditions of marriage were other than they are; and we shall assuredly arrive at the principle that whatever changes are necessary in the conditions of marriage, so that the best women shall become the mothers of the future, must be and will be effected.

One has elsewhere argued at length that monogamy is the marriage form which has prevailed and will be maintained because of its superior survival-value—in other words, because it best serves the interests of the future. But what of the individual in a country where there are thirteen hundred thousand adult women in excess of men, which is the case of Great Britain? Plainly, there is need for very serious criticism of such an institution in such circumstances. Let the reader briefly be reminded, then, that, as I have previously argued, Nature makes no arrangement for such a disproportion between the sexes. More boys than girls are indeed born, but from our infantile mortality, which is largely a male infanticide, onwards, morbid influences are at work which result in the disproportion already named.

Two excellent reasons may be adduced why any disproportion in the numbers of the sexes should be the opposite of that which now obtains. The ideal condition, no doubt, is that of numerical equality. Failing that, the evils of a male preponderance, though very real, are comparatively small. For one thing, celibacy affects a woman more than a man: men, on the whole, suffer less from being unmarried. It is a more serious deprivation for the woman than for the man, in general, to be debarred from parenthood. This is a proposition which we need not labour here, for no reader will dispute its importance and its relevance.

No less important is the economic question. Specially consecrated as she is to the future, woman as distinctive woman is necessarily handicapped in relation to the present. She is at an economic disadvantage. One's blood boils at the cruel effrontery of men who protest against women's efforts to gain an honest living, but who have never a word or a deed against prostitution or against the causes which produce the numerical preponderance of women. But here again our proposition, though unfamiliar, and indeed so far as I know never yet stated, needs no labouring—that owing to the economic opportunities of the sexes, it is, at any rate, on that ground, of no significance that men shall be in excess in a community, but it is of very grave significance that women shall be in excess. It is pitiable, and indeed revolting, in this country where the excess of women is so marked, to hear from year to year the comments of men upon the supposed degeneration of women, upon their unnatural selfishness, their desire to invade spheres which do not belong to them, and so forth and so forth ad nauseam; whilst these commentators are themselves hand in hand with drink, with war and with Mammon, destroying male children of all ages in disproportionate excess, sending our manhood to be slain in war, and sending it also in the cause of industry—that is to say, in the cause of gold—to our colonies, as if the culture of the racial life were not the vital industry of any people.

A third very important reason why a numerical preponderance of women is more injurious to a country than a numerical preponderance of men is that, though the duty and responsibility of selection for parenthood devolves upon both sexes, it is normally discharged with greater efficiency by women than by men; and a numerical preponderance of women gravely interferes with their performance of this great function. It may obviously be argued that such a preponderance leaves a greater choice to the men. But I believe that men do not exercise their choice so well. In a word, women are more fastidious; the racial instinct is weaker in them, less rampant and less roving. In the exercise of this function women are therefore, on the whole, naturally more capable, more responsible, less liable to be turned aside by the demands of the moment. In his "Pure Sociology," Professor Lester Ward has very clearly and forcibly discussed the comparative behaviour of the two sexes in this matter, and he shows how the great feminine sentiment, not confined merely to the human species, is to choose the best. The principle is also a factor in masculine action, but much less markedly so. What we call, then, the greater fastidiousness of the female sex is a definite sex character, and has a definite racial value, raising the standard of fatherhood where it is allowed free play. But in a nation which contains a great excess of women, under economic conditions which are greatly to their disadvantage, the value of this natural fastidiousness is practically lost. Such are the conditions in Great Britain at present that practically any man, of however low a type, however diseased, however unworthy for parenthood, may become a father, if he pleases.

The natural condition suitable to monogamy being a numerical equality of the sexes, the suggestion may obviously be made that where there is a great excess of women, monogamy should yield to polygamy; and indeed where there is such excess monogamy is more apparent than real—an ideal rather than a practice. Thus we have one or two modern authors who have installed themselves in sociology by the royal road of romance—though even to this branch of learning, as to mathematics, there is no short cut whatsoever, even for those whose pens are naturally skilful—authors who tell us that, given this numerical preponderance of women, some kind of polygamous modification of the present marriage system should certainly be adopted. To one aspect of this contention we shall later return. Meanwhile, the answer is that, rather than abolish monogamy, we should strive to alter the conditions which produce such an excess of women. If such an aim were necessarily impracticable, we might well feel inclined to vote for polygamy rather than the present state of things. It is a very decent alternative to prostitution. But in point of fact our aim of equalizing the numbers of the sexes, which I assert as a canon of fundamental politics, is eminently practicable; and here we may briefly outline, as very relevant to the problems of womanhood, the methods by which that aim is to be realized for the good of both sexes in the present and the future.

Nature gives us more than a fair start, almost as if she knew that the wastage of male life is apt to be higher at all ages even under the best conditions. She sends more male children into the world, as if to secure, on the whole, an equality of the sexes in adult life. That ideal is realizable, even allowing for a considerable excess of male deaths. One of our duties, then, is to control that part of the male death-rate, if any, which is controllable. To begin at the beginning, we find that infant mortality claims our attention at once. For years past in the campaign against infant mortality I have urged this as an apparently somewhat remote, yet very real and important issue. Infant mortality bears heaviest upon male babies. It is largely, as I have so often said, a male infanticide, notably contrasting with the practice of deliberate female infanticide which is known in so many times and places. In lowering the infant mortality we shall reduce this disproportion of male deaths, and shall make for the survival of a larger number of men. Bring down the infant mortality to proper limits and we shall have in adult life possible male partners for a large number of women who are now without such because of the male infanticide of twenty and thirty years ago.

It is characteristic of the fashion in which the surface gains our attention while the substance evades it, that the question of the disproportion of the sexes should have been brought to the public notice in regard to a subject which, though not unimportant, is quite secondary compared with those which we are now discussing. Only three or four years ago people were startled and incredulous when one told them by the pen or in lectures that there was a very great excess of women in these islands. Nowadays everybody knows it. This is not because people have suddenly come to realize the fundamental importance for the State of such matters, but simply because the fact provides an argument regarding Woman Suffrage. This immensely important fact of female preponderance, with its gigantic consequences, which affect every aspect of the national life, was totally ignored by the public until, forsooth, it became an argument against Woman Suffrage; and then the foolish people whose voices are allowed to be heard on these complicated matters, but who would be laughed out of court if they expressed their opinions on other subjects equally outside their competence, told us that woman's suffrage would mean government by women, they being in the majority. For all other consequences of this gigantic fact they have no concern; not even the mental capacity to grasp that it must have consequences. But this, which happens not to be a consequence of it, they are loud to insist upon. At any rate, they have done this service until the public at last is acquainted with the demographic fact; and one of the suffragist leaders some time ago publicly expressed an old argument of the present writer's that in point of fact this grave supposed consequence of woman's suffrage need not be feared if only for the reason that Woman Suffrage would certainly mean increased attention to infant mortality, and therefore increased control of the morbid causes which at present account for female preponderance.

It might indeed be added also that, in so far as Woman Suffrage operated against war, it would contribute in another way to the correction of this numerical disparity. Not the least of the many evils which have flowed from the last hideous war in which Great Britain engaged—evils which glass-eyed politicians have since been exploiting in the interests of their own charlatanry—is the loss to scores of thousands of women in this country of the complemental manhood which was destroyed by wounds and more especially by disease in South Africa. The wickedness with which that war was entered upon, and the criminal ignorance with which it was mismanaged, and the elementary principles of hygiene defied, have their consequences to-day in much of the unmated and handicapped womanhood of Great Britain. It may be noted that polygamy as a historical phenomenon has commonly and necessarily been associated with militarism. Large destruction of manhood by war leads to a numerical excess of women, and polygamy is a consequence. If the consequences in our modern civilization are less decent than polygamy, which would affront the beautiful minds that are unconcerned for Regent Street, surely our duty is more strenuously than ever to combat the causes which, as we see, are quite definitely traceable and controllable.

The increased attention paid to the conditions of child life is of direct service to the nation, and to womanhood in especial, by tending to interfere with the excessive and unnecessary mortality of boys. As we have elsewhere observed, the male organism has less vitality than the female organism. When both sexes at any age are subjected to the same injurious influences, more males than females die. Thus all our work with such a measure as the Children Act, keeping children out of public-houses, and so forth, directly serves the womanhood of the not distant future by preserving a certain amount of manhood to keep it company. Accepting the truth of the dictum that it is not good for man to be alone, we have to learn the still more general and profound truth that it is not good for woman to be alone, and, as we now learn, the modern movement for the care of childhood has this notable consequence, which I have been pointing out for many years and now insist upon once again, that it makes for the greater numerical equality of the sexes in adult life, and therefore for the relief of the many evils near and remote which flow from the numerical excess of women. Answering the question, "Whither are we tending?" in Christmas, 1909, Mr. G. K. Chesterton referred to our liability to "float feebly towards every sociological fad or novelty until we believe in some plain, cold, crude insanity, such as keeping children out of public-houses."[16] Considering the authority, I think this is fairly good testimony toward the wisdom of the achievement to which some of us devoted the greater part of three strenuous years; and if the question is to be asked "whither are we tending," part of the answer will be that by such measures as this for the care of child life, which means in practice especially for the keeping alive of boys, we are tending toward the correction of one of the gravest, though least recognized, evils of the present day.

Our business in the present volume is not with childhood. It is not possible to go fully into the statistical details of the comparative death-rate of the sexes, but the data can readily be obtained by any interested reader.[17]

It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped the notice of previous students.

Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem, and that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also. As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the morrow.

If other needs were not so pressing, one might well devote an entire volume, not inappropriately in these days of fiscal controversy, to the question of vital imports and exports. Year after year passes, and politicians in Great Britain grow more and more voracious and, if possible, less and less veracious on the subject of what they misunderstand by imports and exports. The subject is really one for knowledge, not for politicians. With great ceremony at intervals, they go through the highly superfluous performance of calling each other liars, as who should say that Queen Anne is dead: and while this tragical farce continues the question of vital imports and exports is ignored. Within it there lies the key to the Irish question, for instance, since no nation can be saved which persistently exports the best of its life. And in this question also lies the key to a great part of the woman question and to a great part of the colonial question. Politicians who have not even discovered yet that trade is a process of exchange, and who assume that in every bargain someone is being worsted, pay no heed to the questions what sort of people leave our shores, and what sort of people enter them. Or rather, as if in order to emphasize their blindness to fundamentals, they make a point about passing an act against alien immigration, which merely serves to throw into prominence our national neglect of this great issue. This is not the time and the place in which I can deal with it in its entirety, but it must be referred to in so far as it bears on the proportion of the sexes. Toward the end of 1909 there was a long correspondence in the Times on the subject of "Unmarried Daughters." One may print in the text the admirable letter in which a finger is put upon the heart of the question. We are told about the incompetence of women to deal with national affairs, but here we find a woman writing to the Times on a fundamental matter for the Imperialist, though no member of our Houses of Parliament has yet given any attention to it.