io 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that distant future when the world will be fully peopled, in per- 

 fect confidence that an equilibrium between the birth and death 

 rates will then be brought about by a combination of physical 

 and social agencies, and the bugbear of over-population become 

 finally extinct.* 



There now only remains for consideration the means by which, 

 in such a society, a continuous improvement of the race could be 

 brought about, on the assumption that for this purpose educa- 

 tion is powerless as a direct agency, since its effects are not heredi- 

 tary, and that some form of selection is an absolute necessity. 

 This improvement I believe will certainly be effected through 

 the agency of female choice in marriage. Let us, therefore, con- 

 sider how this would probably act. 



It will be generally admitted that, although many women now 

 remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there 

 are always a considerable number who feel no strong inclination 

 to marriage, and who accept husbands to secure a subsistence or 

 a home of their own rather than from personal affection or sexual 

 emotion. In a society in which women were all pecuniarily in- 

 dependent, were all fully occupied with public duties and intel- 

 lectual or social enjoyments, and had nothing to gain by mar- 

 riage as regards material well-being, we may be sure that the 

 number of the unmarried from choice would largely increase. It 

 would probably come to be considered a degradation for any 

 woman to marry a man she could not both love and esteem, and 

 this feeling would supply ample reasons for either abstaining 

 from marriage altogether or delaying it till a worthy and sym- 

 pathetic husband was encountered. In man, on the other hand, 

 the passion of love is more general, and usually stronger ; and as 

 in such a society as is here postulated there would be no way of 

 gratifying this passion but by marriage, almost every woman 

 would receive offers, and thus a powerful selective agency would 

 rest with the female sex. Under the system of education and of 

 public opinion here suggested there can be no doubt how this 

 selection would be exercised. The idle and the selfish would be 

 almost universally rejected. The diseased or the weak in intel- 

 lect would also usually remain unmarried ; while those who ex- 

 hibited any tendency to insanity or to hereditary disease, or who 

 possessed any congenital deformity, would in hardly any case find 

 partners, because it would be considered an offense against society 

 to be the means of perpetuating such diseases or imperfections. 



We must also take into account a special factor hitherto, I 

 believe, unnoticed in this connection, that would in all probability 



* A Theory of Population deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility. Repub- 

 lished from the Westminster Review for April, 1852. 



