XXVII HUMAN PROGRESS: PAST AND FUTURE 507 



social compulsion, to sell herself whether in or out of 

 wedlock, and when all women alike shall feel the refining 

 influence of a true humanizing education, of beautiful and 

 elevating surroundings, and of a public opinion which 

 shall be founded on the highest aspirations of their age 

 and country, the result will be a form of human selection 

 which will bring about a continuous advance in the 

 average status of the race. Under such conditions, all 

 who are deformed either in body or mind, though they 

 may be able to lead happy and contented lives, will, as a 

 rule, leave no children to inherit their deformity. Even 

 now we find many women who never marry because they 

 have never found the man of their ideal. When no 

 woman will be compelled to marry for a bare living or for 

 a comfortable home, those who remain unmarried from 

 their own free choice will certainly increase, while many 

 others, having no inducement to an early marriage, will 

 wait till they meet with a partner who is really congenial 

 to them. 



In such a reformed society the vicious man, the man of 

 degraded taste or of feeble intellect, will have little chance 

 of finding a wife, and his bad qualities will die out with 

 himself. The most perfect and beautiful in body and 

 mind will, on the other hand, be most sought and there- 

 fore be most likely to marry early, the less highly endowed 

 later, and the least gifted in any way the latest of all, and 

 this will be the case with both sexes. From this varying 

 age of marriage, as Mr. Gal ton has shown, there will 

 result a more rapid increase of the former than of the 

 latter, and this cause continuing at work for successive 

 generations will at length bring the average man to be 

 the equal of those who are now among the more advanced 

 of the race. 



When this average rise has been brought about there 

 must result a corresponding rise in the high-water mark 

 of humanity ; in other words, the great men of that era 

 will be as much above those of the last two thousand 

 years as the average man will have risen above the average 

 of that period. For, those fortunate combinations of 

 germs which, on the theory we are discussing, have 



