So long as the present low rates of pay and uncertain conditions of employment continue, the blood of men will continue more and more to be corrupted, and that of women to be impoverished, while waiting for the marriage which might have given to society excellent children born of healthy and happy parents. So long as societies thus fatuously sacrifice their highest values will every other kind of social reform be nothing but a work of Penelope, of which the night will undo what the day has done. CHAPTER IV LOVE’S SELECTION In the foregoing chapter it was insisted that love’s freedom in the procreation of new life must have a downward limit, in that this freedom can only be allowed to those who have attained the age of sexual maturity. But it ought also to have an upward limit, since a great difference in age between father and mother—like the advanced age of one of them—offers unfavourable conditions for the health, strength, and upbringing of the children. And as, for reasons given in the last chapter, the lawful age of marriage for both sexes must be put at twenty-one, a difference in age of twenty-five years should be the highest the law ought to allow in one or the other case. No one who sees the meaning of life in its advance towards higher forms would dispute nowadays the obvious duty of not transmitting serious diseases the hereditariness of which is already ascertained by science. But as this has only been ascertained in a few cases, legal hindrances as regards the many doubtful cases would be not only a—perhaps meaningless—interference with the life of the individual, but also an unfavourable circumstance for continued research in the most important branch of biology.