selection work to insure the marriage of the fittest according to our best moral, mental and physical standards?
In the absence of any Bradstreet's of marriageability, we should be able to take our college graduates as a picked class, probably for all three ratings, and the indications here are not encouraging. According to the Yale Alumni Weekly, the percentage of married men in twenty classes, twenty years after leaving college, is estimated at only 61 per cent., less than two thirds. The annual report of the president of Harvard College (1901-2) gives for the classes of 1872-7, twenty-five to thirty years after graduation, 28 per cent, still unmarried, and Dr. G. Stanley Hall estimates that, while three fourths of the men graduates of colleges remain single for twenty-five years after graduation, one half of the women graduates are still unmarried after ten years.
Since, then, the marriage rate of men and women of education and achievement is below the average of the population, the eugenicist is at one with the advocate of social progress who seeks definite means to raise the choosing of a mate to a higher plane than at present. The aims are two—first to induce all the suitable to embrace matrimony, and second to make the choice as discriminative as possible of the characteristics most socially desirable.
Legislation is here out of the question, and the only hope is in a gradual modification of public opinion in regard to personal evaluations. That this is not a forlorn hope is shown by the changes that have already come about in sexual desirability, in response to social and esthetic progress. Women no longer require proofs of personal prowess in their mates, and masculine beauty possesses on the whole less attractiveness in our times than achievement. The criterion of feminine excellence has varied from the physical perfection of ancient times to the spirituelle attenuation of our grandmothers, and now fortunately back to a standard into which physique again frankly enters. We have some justification also in saying that the moral standard for masculine and the mental for feminine excellence have risen since the days of "Tom Jones" and "The Vicar of Wakefield."
While it is undeniable that love when once established defies rational considerations, yet we must remember that sexual selection proceeds usually through two stages, the first being one of mere mutual attraction and interest. It is in this stage that the will and the reason are still operative, and here alone that any considerable elevation of standard may be effective. There is in this book, therefore, no suggestion of substituting the planned marriage for the romantic, but merely of bringing the preliminary psychological stage of the latter under the control of reason rather than chance.
It is worth while, accordingly, to indicate some directions in which the public opinion of the twentieth century may well be modified.
