HUMAN SELECTION. 99 



barest subsistence, while another large proportion are forced into 

 more or less uncongenial marriages as the only means of securing 

 some amount of personal independence or physical well-being ? 

 Let any one consider, on the one hand, the lives of the wealthy as 

 portrayed in the society newspapers and even in the advertise- 

 ments of such papers as The Field and The Queen, with their 

 endless round of pleasure and luxury, their almost inconceivable 

 wastefulness and extravagance, indicated by the cost of female 

 dress and such facts as the expenditure of a thousand pounds on 

 the flowers for a single entertainment ; and, on the other hand, 

 the terrible condition of millions of workers men, women, and 

 children as detailed in the Report of the Lords Commission on 

 Sweating, on absolutely incontestable evidence, and the still more 

 awful condition of those who seek work of any kind in vain, and, 

 seeing their children slowly dying of starvation, are driven in 

 utter helplessness and despair to murder and suicide. Can any 

 thoughtful person admit for a moment that, in a society so consti- 

 tuted that these overwhelming contrasts of luxury and privation 

 are looked upon as necessities, and are treated by the Legislature 

 as matters with which it has practically nothing to do, there is 

 the smallest probability that we can deal successfully with such 

 tremendous social problems as those which involve the marriage 

 tie and the family relation as a means of promoting the physical 

 and moral advancement of the race ? What a mockery to still 

 further whiten the sepulchre of modern society, in which is hid- 

 den " all manner of corruption," with schemes for the moral and 

 physical advancement of the race ! 



It is my firm conviction, for reasons which I shall state pres- 

 ently, that when we have cleansed the Augean stable of our exist- 

 ing social organization, and have made such arrangements that 

 all shall contribute their share of either physical or mental labor, 

 and that all workers shall reap the full reward of their work, the 

 future of the race will be insured by those laws of human devel- 

 opment that have led to the slow but continuous advance in the 

 higher qualities of human nature. When men and women are 

 alike free to follow their best impulses ; when idleness and vicious 

 or useless luxury on the one hand, oppressive labor and starvation 

 on the other, are alike unknown ; when all receive the best and 

 most thorough education that the state of civilization and knowl- 

 edge at the time will admit ; when the standard of public opinion 

 is set by the wisest and the best, and that standard is systemati- 

 cally inculcated on the young ; then we shall find that a system of 

 selection will come spontaneously into action which will steadily 

 tend to eliminate the lower and more degraded types of man, and 

 thus continuously raise the average standard of the race. I there- 

 fore strongly protest against any attempt to deal with this great 



