SEXUAL SELECTION, ASSORTATIVE MATING, ETC. 235 
But whatever may be its present shortcomings sexual selection 
is an evolutionary factor of magnificent possibilities. It affords 
perhaps the readiest method for a group to realize its eugenic 
ideals. Alfred Russell Wallace believes that when economic 
reforms do away with the present temptation for women to marry 
in order to secure subsistence and a home the standard of mar- 
riage selection will be greatly raised. ‘The idle or the utterly 
selfish would be almost universally rejected; the chronically 
diseased or the weak in intellect would also usually remain 
unmarried, at least till an advanced period of life, while those who 
showed any tendency to insanity or exhibited any congenital 
deformity would also be rejected by the younger women, because 
it would be considered an offense against society to be the means 
of perpetuating any such diseases or imperfections.” Women, 
Wallace contends, are now driven to marry ‘“‘men who are pal- 
pably unjust, stupid or weak,” and that ‘“‘it may be taken as 
certain, therefore, than when women are economically and so- 
cially free to choose, numbers of the worst men among all classes 
who now readily obtain wives will be almost certainly rejected.” 
One would like to be able to share Wallace’s sanguine hopes 
of the eugenic potency of economic reform. Perhaps his chival- 
rous championship of oppressed woman has prevented him from 
giving due weight to the existence of the idle, worthless and selfish 
members of the weaker sex who, in an improved economic régime, 
would probably find no greater difficulty than they do at present 
in attaching themselves to some unfortunate male. Both the 
worthless and the worthy tend to mate with their own kind, and 
they would doubtless continue to do so under any economic sys- 
tem that could be devised. It is not so much economic reform 
per se that would improve marriage selection, as the greater 
diffusion of education, and the elevation of the ethical standards 
of the mass of the people. The amelioration of economic abuses 
ifications for parentage. The better-paid, well-nourished, provident artizans are 
marrying later in life, and producing fewer offspring than the slum natives, Profes- 
sional men, doctors, solicitors, clergymen, authors, artists, teachers and brain- 
workers are forced in large numbers to defer wedlock till middle age, or even later.” 
Gallichan, The Great Unmarried, p. 41. 
