It is in the highest degree presumptuous and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most vital and most sacred of all human relations, regardless of the fact that our present phase of social development is not only extremely imperfect, but, as I have already shown, vicious and rotten at the core. How can it be possible to determine by legislation those relations of the sexes which shall be best alike for individuals and for the race, in a society in which a large proportion of our women are forced to work long hours daily for the barest subsistence, with an almost total absence of the rational pleasures of life, for the want of which thousands are driven into wholly uncongenial marriages in order to secure some amount of personal independence or physical well-being? Let anyone consider, on the one hand, the lives of the wealthy as portrayed in the society newspapers of the day, with their endless round of pleasure and luxury, their almost inconceivable wastefulness and extravagance, indicated by the cost of female dress and the fact of a thousand pounds or more being expended on the flowers for a single entertainment. On the other hand, let him contemplate the awful lives of millions of workers, so miserably paid and with such uncertainty of work that many thousands of the women and young girls are driven on the streets as the only means of breaking the monotony of their unceasing labour and obtaining some taste of the enjoyments of life at whatever cost; and then ask himself if the Legislature which cannot remedy _this_ state of things should venture to meddle with the great problems of marriage and the sanctities of family life. Is it not a hideous mockery that the successive Governments which for forty years have seen the people they profess to govern so driven to despair by the vile conditions of their existence that in an ever larger and larger proportion they seek death by suicide as their only means of escape—that Governments which have done nothing to put an end to this continuous horror of starvation and suicide, should be thought capable of remedying some of its more terrible _results_, while leaving its _causes_ absolutely untouched? It is my firm conviction, for reasons I shall give farther on, that, when we have cleansed the Augean stable of our present social organisation, and have made such arrangements that _all_ shall contribute their share either of physical or mental labour, and that every one shall obtain the full and equal reward for their work, the future progress of the race will be rendered certain by the fuller development of its higher nature acted on by a special form of selection which will then come into play.