In point of fact, women have always done the choosing, from the matriarchate down to the present. To be sure, daughters have been married off according to parental arrangement, but where this custom has prevailed, the sons have been similarly treated. Marriages were arranged by the families, with little regard for the young persons. In America, the large majority of young people are allowed to decide for themselves in the matter of marriage. And the women do the choosing. Oh, they don’t actually propose. Their tactics are far more subtle. Tantalizing frocks, alluring rouges, provocative perfumes, all do their part toward luring the man on. From among several young men, it is the girl who makes the choice, and does it so cleverly, and perhaps so unconsciously, that the young man thinks all credit is due to him. When the daughters are inept, the mothers are usually on hand to help. This is right. Only, it should be frankly admitted, rather than cloaked under a veil of hypocrisy. For the good of the race, women are the better choosers. Man, whose only instinct is the biological urge to fertilize, pursues all women, and takes those whom he can get. From among a group of women, he is sure to take the least clever, the one who is slow-witted in eluding him, the one whom he can get. To be sure, he may try to pick the most beautiful, but usually her beauty covers an empty head, and he doesn’t care. Needless to say, these women are not the best fitted to mother the race. When a woman chooses from among a number of men, she picks the tallest, the strongest, the most clever. So, while man’s choice tends to bring down the standard of the race, woman’s tends to raise it. Prudish minds may some day come to realize that there is no immodesty in a woman’s letting a man know that she is willing to marry him. The best of all methods would be where the proposal was a mutual thing. _The Child Problem._—The natural purpose of mating is to beget children. The original scheme of nature is built around this fact. But nature had no hand in planning civilization, large cities, and our present economic standards. It is all very well to say that people are going contrary to the plans of nature in refusing to have children, and that this is a sin. Poverty is a sin, the struggle for existence is a sin. And since these are part and parcel of our living today, it is often better to add the so-called sin of refusing to have children to the list than to commit a more heinous offense by bringing small lives into the world without having the adequate means to provide for them. No human being has an ethical right to bring children into the world unless he can provide healthy surroundings and all of the normal advantages.