THE GREAT UNMARRIED 
A REVIEW 
\ ' YE COUNSEL marriage strenu- 
ously with one breath, Walter 
M. Gallichan complains, and 
impose hindrances to practice 
with the next. He has therefore written 
a book urging that we counsel marriage 
still more strenuously, and that we at 
the same time remove some of these 
hindrances to practice. 
In so doing, he has shown himself to 
be a constructive eugenicist. His statis- 
tics are sometimes unsound; but statis- 
tics are a small part of his book. The 
“authorities” he cites are not always 
authoritative; but his book does not 
depend on the citations of authority. 
He has written an eloquent plea for a 
more eugenic view of marriage; his plea 
is marked by restraint and delicacy of 
feeling, and he puts forward no wildly 
impracticable ideas. It is written in a 
spirit of sanity and upbuilding that 
deserves commendation. 
Mr. Gallichan’s analysis of the causes 
and extent of celibacy offers little that 
is new, and being English in origin, is 
not always applicable to conditions in 
the United States. He balances sympa- 
thetically the justifiable and unjusti- 
fiable reasons which lead men to remain 
unmarried: selfishness, the desire to get 
along in one’s profession, the fear of 
supposed feminine extravagance, and 
incompetence—economic causes, in gen- 
eral. The enforced celibacy of women 
is the natural consequence of the celi- 
bacy of men; most women, he thinks, 
would marry if they had the opportun- 
ity. 
This postponement or avoidance of 
marriage naturally brings many evils, 
but he has little patience for those who 
merely wish to suppress the symptoms 
of the disease without attacking the 
causes. “If some of the activity applied 
to the attempted suppression of sexual 
vice were devoted to making the path 
Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1916. 
1The Great Unmarried, by Walter M. Gallichan. 
of sexual virtue less difficult, great 
triumphs for the moralist would ensue.”’ 
WHAT ARE THE REMEDIES? 
But the widespread postponement of 
marriage, and the various evil conse- 
quences of it, are well-known to eugen- 
icists, who will be most interested in 
Mr. Gallichan’s answer to the question, 
“What are the remedies?” He first 
dismisses as wholly impracticable three 
that have been suggested: (1) polygamy, 
(2) free love, (3) taxation of bachelors. 
The latter proposal, he remarks, “‘is 
typical of the disposition to tinker with 
an abnormality instead of seeking down 
to its source and striving to annihilate it. 
The reformers take it for granted that 
the bachelor is an anti-social individual 
who selfishly abstains from marriage 
and parenthood. This is only true of a 
percentage of well-to-do single men. 
The larger proportion of bachelors are 
single through necessity, not from 
deliberate preference. Obviously it 
would be unjust to tax those who are 
already debarred, through economic 
reasons, from entering matrimony. Tax- 
ing the rich bachelor would not encour- 
age himto marry. . . The best way 
to diminish the number of bachelors is 
to adapt marriage to the present needs 
of the community by removing formid- 
able hindrances to the altar.”’ 
The first hindrances which must be 
removed are the economic. He 
discusses: 
(a) The necessity for a living wage. 
(b) Cooperation or _ profit-sharing 
schemes. 
(c) Development of the resources of 
the land—a “back to the land’’ move- 
ment. 
(d) Maternity grants or other state 
aid for motherhood. He does not 
discuss this in detail, but his attitude 
in other portions of the book shows he 
Pp. 225, price $2,25 net. New York, 
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