It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as possible that, if the idea of race-culture is even in the smallest degree to be realised, it must work through motherhood and fatherhood not less in their psychical than in their physical aspects. It is time to have done with the gross delusions of Nietzsche regarding the nature and course of organic evolution. Morality is not an invention of man but man the child of morality, and it is not by the abolition of motherhood, in which morality originated, nor of fatherhood, its first ally, that the super-man is to be evolved: but by the attainment of those lofty conceptions of the function, the responsibility and the privilege of parenthood which it is the first business of eugenics to inculcate. As for marriage, invaluable though at its best it be for the completion and ennoblement of the individual life, its great function for society and for the race is in relation to childhood. Thus considered, the dictum of Professor Westermarck may be understood, that children are not the result of marriage but marriage the result of children. This, in other words, is to say that marriage has become evolved and established as a social institution because of its services to race-culture. It is, in short, the supreme eugenic institution. This great subject must next occupy our attention. CHAPTER X MARRIAGE AND MATERNALISM Our present concern is the relation of marriage to race-culture, and for this purpose we must investigate an epoch ages before the institution of human marriage, ages before mankind itself. We must first remind ourselves of what may be called the trend of progress from the first in respect of that reproduction upon which all species depend, all living individuals being mortal. At first, in the effort for survival and increase, life tried the quantitative method. If we take the present day bacteria as representatives of the primitive method, we see that not quality nor individuality but quantity and numbers are the means by which, in their case, life seeks to establish itself more abundantly. We express our own birth-rate in its proportion per year to one thousand living: but twenty thousand bacteria injected into a rabbit have been found to multiply into twelve thousand million in one day. “One bacterium has been actually observed to rear a small family of eighty thousand within a period of twenty-four hours.” “The cholera bacillus can duplicate every twenty minutes, and might thus in one day become 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, with the weight, according to the calculations of Cohn, of about 7,366 tons. In a few days, at this rate, there would be a mass of bacteria as big as the moon, huge enough to fill the whole ocean.”