Alfred Russel Wallace 



in order to secure some amount of personal independence 

 or physical well-being. He believed that when men and 

 women are, for the first time in the course of civilisation, 

 equally free to follow their best impulses; when idleness 

 and vicious and hurtful luxury on the one hand, and 

 oppressive labour and the dread of starvation on the 

 other, are alike unknown; when all receive the best and 

 broadest education that the state of civilisation and know- 

 ledge will admit; when the standard of public opinion 

 is set by the wisest and the best among us, and that 

 standard is systematically inculcated in the young — then 

 we shall find that a system of truly " Natural Selection " 

 (a term that Wallace preferred to " Eugenics," which he 

 utterly disliked) will come spontaneously into action which 

 will tend steadily to eliminate the lower, the less developed, 

 or in any way defective types of men, and will thus continu- 

 ously raise the physical, moral, and intellectual standard of 

 the race. 



He further held that *' although many women now remain 

 unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are 

 always considerable numbers who feel no strong impulse to 

 marriage, and accept husbands to secure subsistence and a 

 home of their own rather than from personal affection or 

 sexual emotion. In a state of society in which all women 

 were economically independent, where all were fully occupied 

 with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and 

 had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well- 

 being or social position, it is highly probable that the num- 

 bers of unmarried from choice would increase. It would 

 probably come to be considered a degradation for any 

 woman to marry a man whom she could not love and 

 esteem, and this reason would tend at least to delay 

 marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner was en- 

 countered." 



150 



