they
are sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have to
start in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourable
circumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world to
supplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the best
woman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently far
from perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good deal
worse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choice
himself on abstract biological and 'eugenic' principles. And, indeed,
the very existence of better and worse in the world is a condition
precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with
individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be
no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief
besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very
great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully
carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the
world would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily reckless
and dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles were
universally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natures
would be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so much
interfered with or sensibly retarded.

In the second place, again, it must not be forgotten that falling in
love has never yet, among civilised men at least, had a fair field and
no favour. Many marriages are arranged on very different
grounds--grounds of convenience, grounds of cupidity, grounds of
religion, grounds of snobbishness. In many cases it is clearly
demonstrable that such marriages are productive in the highest degree of
evil consequences. Take the case of heiresses. An heiress is almost by
necessity the one last feeble and flickering relic of a moribund
stock--often of a stock reduced by the sordid pursuit of ill-gotten
wealth almost to the very verge of actual insanity. But let her be ever
so ugly, ever so unhealthy, ever so hysterical, ever so mad, somebody or
other will be ready and eager to marry her on any terms. Considerations
of this sort have helped to stock the world with many feeble and
unhealthy persons. Among the middle and upper classes it may be safely
said only a very small percentage of marriages is ever due to love
alone; in other words, to instinctive feeling. The remainder have been
influe