EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



owing to the appearance of man s moral sense and 

 higher intellectual faculties, have made the sur 

 vival of the fittest to coincide with, the survival 

 of what we are pleased to consider the best. In 

 other words, there is already at work a most po 

 tent force that has long made and is still making 

 for the improvement of the human breed which, 

 indeed, owes to that force its very origin. Now 

 by means of eugenics, as I understand it, Mr. 

 Gait on merely proposes to enlist man s conscious 

 co-operation with and encouragement of the factor 

 which Darwin and Wallace discovered. It is not 

 unfitting that this great biologist should be the 

 prophet to the twentieth century of the applica 

 tion of that principle which his cousin, the great 

 est biologist of any age, constituted the chief rev 

 elation of the nineteenth century. 



We may observe the operation of the eugenic 

 principle at this hour by studying the &quot; expectation 

 of life&quot; among married and unmarried persons. 

 As every one knows, the married live longer than 

 the unmarried, a fact which was accepted as prov 

 ing that marriage is conducive to long life, until 

 Spencer analyzed it in his Study of Sociology and 

 showed that the married are already the selected 

 of their generation. On the average, &quot;the married 

 man was fated to marry because of certain char 

 acters such as physical beauty, efficiency, &quot;at 

 tractiveness,&quot; love of domesticity, fondness for 

 children which make him more valuable to the 

 race than his less fortunate fellows. Certain it is 



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