218 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



system which public opinion, based upon a knowledge 

 of heredity, may be trusted to bring about. The 

 general recognition of the moral side of heredity will 

 tend to revolutionise our time-honoured method of 

 match-making in which the moral fitness of the parties 

 is never taken into account. Physical fitness is so 

 far considered that the union of a young girl with an 

 old man, or a young man with an old woman, for the 

 sake of wealth or worldly position, is generally con- 

 demned. The deformity of one of the parties is also 

 deemed to be a bar to marriage. But the existence 

 in a given family of insanity, drunkenness, or vicious 

 propensities of any sort, is not yet thought to be a 

 disqualification to any of the marriageable members 

 of that family, provided they appear to be free from 

 the congenital taint. No heed is given to the possi- 

 bility of the disease existing in those persons in a 

 latent form, to be developed by them in after life or 

 transmitted to their children in a simple or a meta- 

 morphosed state. To this fertile source of misery and 

 suffering we may assume the society of the future 

 will open its eyes with a view to the establishment 

 of a system of moral as well as physical selection. 



There has frequently been acted in London during 

 the past twenty years a comedy in which the prin- 



