When men and women are, for the first time in the course of civilisation, alike free to follow their best impulses; when idleness and vicious or hurtful luxury on the one hand, oppressive labour and the dread of starvation on the other, are alike unknown; when _all_ receive the best and broadest education that the state of civilisation and knowledge will admit; when the standard of public opinion is set by the wisest and the best among us, and that standard is systematically inculcated on the young; then we shall find that a system of _truly natural_ selection will come spontaneously into action which will steadily tend to eliminate the lower, the less developed, or in any way defective types of men, and will thus continuously raise the physical, moral, and intellectual standard of the race. The exact mode in which this selection will operate will now be briefly explained. _Free Selection in Marriage_ It will be generally admitted that although many women now remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are always considerable numbers who feel no strong impulse to marriage, and accept husbands to secure subsistence and a home of their own rather than from personal affection or strong sexual emotion. In a state of society in which all women were economically independent, were all fully occupied with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly probable that the numbers of the unmarried from choice would increase. It would probably come to be considered a degradation for any woman to marry a man whom she could not love and esteem, and this reason would tend at least to delay marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner was encountered. In man, on the other hand, the passion of love is more general and usually stronger; and in such a society as here postulated there would be no way of gratifying this passion but by marriage. Every woman, therefore, would be likely to receive offers, and a powerful selective agency would rest with the female sex. Under the system of education and public opinion here supposed, there can be little doubt how this selection would be exercised. The idle or the utterly selfish would be almost universally rejected; the chronically diseased or the weak in intellect would also usually remain unmarried, at least till an advanced period of life; while those who showed any tendency to insanity or exhibited any congenital deformity would also be rejected by the younger women, because it would be considered an offence against society to be the means of perpetuating any such diseases or imperfections.