Then it has been hinted that young people should meet one another under conditions which make prominent the psychical and put the merely physical or animal into the background--_e.g._ on the hockey field or the ice or in the “literary circle,” rather than in the ball-room. This proposition accords, of course, with what has been said elsewhere as to that great factor of progress which I define as the enhancement of the survival-value of the psychical as against that of the physical. (Note the obvious sequence--survival-value, selection-value, marriage-value, parenthood-value, progress-value.) This proposition and the last might both be worked out, I believe, in considerable detail and not without profit. Arguing on the same lines, we may agree that even such a small matter, usually considered wholly domestic, as the length of engagements, is of eugenic or racial importance. The eugenist, I think, must welcome long engagements simply because, though they may involve a reduced marriage-rate and a reduced birth-rate--the latter partly in consequence of the reduced marriage-rate, and partly because of the later age at marriage--they tend by the mere operation of time, as we say, to enhance the importance of the psychical and to reduce the importance of the physical factors which determine sexual attraction. To these three points a fourth, of great importance, must be added. It is that we should favour, as far as possible, those factors of choice for marriage which are inherent, and therefore transmissible, as against those which are acquired, accidental, and therefore not transmissible, _and therefore_ of no racial or eugenic importance. This, of course, is the point made by Dr. Wallace in the article quoted above--or at any rate it is involved in the point he makes. I simply mean that every time a marriage is brought about by, for instance, money, the eugenic value of marriage is at least nullified and may become actually anti-eugenic. Again I say, _if_ Socialism, or the abolition of (_un_-natural) inheritance, be necessary in order that selection for marriage shall be determined by the possession of personal qualities of racial value rather than the power of the purse, which has always been a racial curse, then the sooner socialism is established the better.