IMPROVEMENT OK THE HUMAN BREED. 535 



dislike the sacrifice of freedom uiul leisure, of opi)ortuiiities for study, 

 and of cultured conipauionship. Tliis lias to be recUoued with. 1 

 heard of the reply of a lady official of a college for women to a visitor 

 who inquired as to the after life of the students. She answered that 

 one-third profited b}' it, another third gained little good, and a third 

 were failures. *'But what becomes of the failures f "Oh, they 

 marry." 



There appears to be a considerable ditierenci^ ))etween the earliest age 

 at which it is ph3'siologicalh- desirable that a woman should marry and 

 that at which the ablest, or at least the most cultured, women usually do. 

 Acceleration in the time of marriage, often amounting to seven years, 

 as from 28 or 2U to 21 or 22, under influences such as those mentioned 

 above is by no means improVjable. What would be its effect on pro- 

 ductivity? It might be expected to act in two ways — 



(1) By shortening each generation by an amount roughh' propor- 

 tionate to the diminution in age at which marriage occurs. Suppose 

 the span of each generation to be shortened b}-^ one-sixth, so that six 

 take the place of five, and that the productivity of each marriage is 

 unaltered, it follows that one-sixth more children will be brought into 

 the world during the same time, which is, roughly, equivalent to 

 increasing the productivity of an unshortened generation by. that 

 amount. 



(2) By saving from certain barrenness the earlier part of the child- 

 bearing period of the woman. Authorities ditter so much as to the 

 direct gain of fertility due to early marriage that it is dangerous to 

 express an opinion. The large and thriving families that I have known 

 were the offspring of mothers who married very young. 



The next influence to be considered is that of healthy homes. These 

 and a simple life certainly conduce to fertility. They also act indi- 

 rectly by preserving lives that would other wise fail to reach adult age. 

 It is not necessarily the weakest who perish in this way — for instance, 

 zymotic disease falls indiscriminatelv on the weak and the strong. 



Again, the children would be healthier and therefore more likely in 

 their turn to become parents of a healthy stock. The great danger to 

 high civilizations, and remarkably so to our own, is the exhaustive 

 drain upon the rural districts to supply large towns. Those who come 

 up to the towns may produce large families, but there is much reason 

 to believe that these dwindle away in subsequent generations. In 

 short, the towns sterilize rural vigor. 



As one of the reasons for choosing the selected class would be that 

 of hereditary fertility, it follows that the selected class would respond 

 more than other classes to the above influences. 



I do not attempt to appraise the strength of the combined six influ- 

 ences just described. If each added one-sixth to the produce the num- 

 ber of offspring would be doubled. This does not seem impossible, 



