Mr. Galton’s system of social reform accords in some respects with that which it is the purpose of this work to set forth. Both systems premise teaching that it is man’s duty and within his power to improve the physical, intellectual and moral structure of his race. He may, in part, achieve this by intelligent forethought and careful action in exercising the function of propagating his kind. Population must not be kept up by consumptives or persons whose pedigree is tainted by any disease known to be hereditary, and public opinion must enforce the necessary restraints. (Temporary illness ought also to be considered. It is when parents are in their best state of health only that they are morally justified in bringing children into the world.) Of these, celibacy is a restraint commended and advised by Mr. Galton, whilst scientific meliorism deliberately rejects it, for celibacy is a vital evil, destroying individual happiness and tending obviously to social disorder. Wherever love in its highest form exists between two individuals, union is eminently desirable; but if either or both be afflicted by disease or hereditary taint, the sacrifice demanded of them is to carefully abstain from giving birth to children. Whether the means adopted be those of natural self-control or of artificial aids to self-control will depend on the views of the individuals immediately concerned, and in this matter society has no right of interference. It is the business, however, of society to sweep away ignorance and make it possible for the poor as well as the rich to enter on the right path voluntarily, and where, from physical or moral degeneracy, self-regulation is impossible, society must exercise authority and coercively restrain the vital social force of propagation. It will not be by means of the lonely lives celibacy entails that civilized men and women will refrain from having children disqualified for useful citizenship. We shall, to quote the late poet laureate’s words, “move upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die,” by other means more worthy of humanity, i.e. by socialized freedom and sex equality; by intelligent self-control voluntarily practised (with or without artificial appliance), and by control, enforced wherever necessary by the State in fulfilment of its responsible duty—the careful guardianship of the congenital blood of future generations. In the savage epoch of our history, the force of natural selection produced survival of the fittest. From that epoch we have long since passed into a semi-civilized epoch in which the force of sympathetic selection produces a miserable state of indiscriminate survival; we have now to pass forward to the epoch in which the rational force of a wise, intelligent selection will systematically secure the birth of the physically fit. CHAPTER IV MARRIAGE