EVOLUTION OF MAN AND ITS CONTROL 61 



selection work to insure the marriage of the fittest according to our 

 best moral, mental and physical standards ? 



In the absence of any Bradstreet's of marriageability, we should be 

 able to take our college graduates as a picked class, probably for all 

 three ratings, and the indications here are not encouraging. According 

 to the Yale Alumni Weekly, the percentage of married men in twenty 

 classes, twenty years after leaving college, is estimated at only 61 per 

 cent., less than two thirds. The annual report of the president of Har- 

 vard College (1901-2) gives for the classes of 1872-7, twenty-five to 

 thirty years after graduation, 28 per cent, still unmarried, and Dr. G. 

 Stanley Hall estimates that, while three fourths of the men graduates 

 of colleges remain single for twenty-five years after graduation, one 

 half of the women graduates are still unmarried after ten years. 



Since, then, the marriage rate of men and women of education and 

 achievement is below the average of the population, the eugenicist is at 

 one with the advocate of social progress who seeks definite means to 

 raise the choosing of a mate to a higher plane than at present. The 

 aims are two — first to induce all the suitable to embrace matrimony, and 

 second to make the choice as discriminative as possible of the character- 

 istics most socially desirable. 



Legislation is here out of the question, and the only hope is in a 

 gradual modification of public opinion in regard to personal evalua- 

 tions. That this is not a forlorn hope is shown by the changes that 

 have already come about in sexual desirability, in response to social and 

 esthetic progress. Women no longer require proofs of personal prowess 

 in their mates, and masculine beauty possesses on the whole less at- 

 tractiveness in our times than achievement. The criterion of feminine 

 excellence has varied from the physical perfection of ancient times to 

 the spirituelle attenuation of our grandmothers, and now fortunately 

 back to a standard into which physique again frankly enters. We have 

 some justification also in saying that the moral standard for masculine 

 and the mental for feminine excellence have risen since the days of 

 " Tom Jones " and " The Vicar of Wakefield." 



While it is undeniable that love when once established defies rational 

 considerations, yet we must remember that sexual selection proceeds 

 usually through two stages, the first being one of mere mutual attrac- 

 tion and interest. It is in this stage that the will and the reason are 

 still operative, and here alone that any considerable elevation of stand- 

 ard may be effective. There is in this book, therefore, no suggestion of 

 substituting the planned marriage for the romantic, but merely of 

 bringing the preliminary psychological stage of the latter under the 

 control of reason rather than chance. 



It is worth while, accordingly, to indicate some directions in which 

 the public opinion of the twentieth century may well be modified. 



