While she will be conceded full political and social rights on an equality with man, she will be placed in a position of responsibility and power which will render her his superior, since the future moral progress of the race will so largely depend upon her free choice in marriage. As time goes on, and she acquires more and more economic independence, _that_ alone will give her an effective choice which she has never had before. But this choice will be further strengthened by the fact that, with ever-increasing approach to equality of opportunity for every child born in our country, that terrible excess of male deaths, in boyhood and early manhood especially, due to various preventable causes, will disappear, and change the present majority of women to a majority of men. This will lead to a greater rivalry for wives, and will give to women the power of rejecting all the lower types of character among their suitors. It will be their special duty so to mould public opinion, through home training and social influence, as to render the women of the future the regenerators of the entire human race. We hope and believe that they will be fully equal to the high and responsible position which, in accordance with natural laws, they will be called upon to fulfil. The certainty that this powerful selective agency will come into existence just in proportion as we reform our existing social system by the abolition of poverty and the establishment of full equality of opportunity in education and economic position, demonstrates that Nature—or the Universal Mind—has not failed or bungled our world so completely as to require the weak and ignorant efforts of the eugenists to set it right, while leaving the great fundamental causes of all existing social evils absolutely untouched. Let them devote all their energies to purifying this whitened sepulchre of destitution and ignorance, and the beneficent laws of human nature will themselves bring about the physical, intellectual, and moral advancement of our race. CHAPTER XVII HOW TO INITIATE AN ERA OF MORAL PROGRESS In Chapters VIII to XII of this volume I have given in briefest outline a summary of the growth during the nineteenth century of the actual social environment in the midst of which we live. We see a continuous advance of man's power to utilise the forces of Nature, to an extent which surpasses everything he had been able to do during all the preceding centuries of his recorded history. We also see that the result of this vast economic revolution has been almost wholly evil.