Control of Heredity: Eugenics 309 



occasion a few years ago to investigate the eugenical record of 

 a coeducational institution, which is not unknown in the world 

 of scholarship, and I found that about 33 per cent of the recent 

 graduates had married fellow students, that there had been no 

 divorces and that there were many children. There is no doubt 

 that coeducation promotes good and early marriages and that it 

 is not necessarily inimical to good scholarship even though it vio- 

 lates the spirit of mediaeval monasticism. There was a time when 

 it was supposed that a scholar must live the monkish life of seclu- 

 sion and contemplation, but the monasteries are disappearing the 

 world over, and it is time that the monastic spirit should go out 

 of the colleges and universities. 



On the other hand the colleges exclusively for men or women 

 appear to have a bad influence on the marriage rate and birth rate 

 of their graduates. Johnson has shown that 90 per cent of all the 

 women of the United States marry before the age of 40, but that 

 among college women only half that number have married at the 

 same age. As a result of investigations at one of the leading 

 women's colleges he finds that the marriage and birth rate of the 

 most brilliant students, who have been elected members of Phi 

 Beta Kappa, is lowest of all. Cattell says that a Harvard grad- 

 uate has on the average three-fourths of a son, a Vassar gradu- 

 ate one-half of a daughter. 



At present early and fruitful marriages among able and am- 

 bitious people are very unfashionable and are becoming increas- 

 ingly impracticable. If society has any regard for its own welfare 

 all this must be changed. As Galton has shown, the race that mar- 

 ries at 22 instead of 33 will possess the earth in two or three 

 centuries. 



The good of society demands that we reverse our methods of 

 putting a premium upon celibacy among our most gifted and 

 ambitious young men and women, and if monastic orders and 

 institutions are to continue they should be open only to those eu- 

 genically unfit. 



