es--St.
Valentine's Day and Sexual Selection--Love and Reason--Love Ruled
by Natural Law--Eugenic Selection not opposed to Love--No Need for
Legal Compulsion--Medicine in Relation to Marriage

I

During recent years the question of the future of the human race has
been brought before us in a way it has never been brought before. The
great expansive movement in civilized countries is over. Whereas, fifty
years ago, France seemed to present a striking contrast to other
countries in her low and gradually falling birth-rate, to-day, though
she has herself now almost reached a stationary position, France is seen
merely to have been the leader in a movement which is common to all the
more highly civilized nations. They are all now moving rapidly in the
direction in which she moved slowly. It was inevitable that this
movement, world-wide as it is, should call forth energetic protests, for
there is no condition of things so bad but it finds some to advocate its
perpetuation. There has, therefore, been much vigorous preaching against
"race suicide" by people who were deaf to the small voice of reason,
who failed to understand that this matter could not be settled by mere
consideration of the crude birth-rates, and that, even if it could, we
should have still to realize that, as an economist remarks, it is to the
decline of the birth-rate only that we probably owe it that the modern
civilized world has been saved from economic disaster.[147]

But whatever the causes of the declining birth-rate it is certain that
even when they are within our control they are of far too intimate a
character for the public moralist to be permitted to touch them, even
though we consider them to be in a disastrous state. It has to be
recognized that we are here in the presence, not of a merely local or
temporary tendency which might be shaken off with an effort, but of a
great fundamental law of civilization; and the fact that we encounter it
in our own race merely means that we are reaching a fairly high stage of
civilization. It is far from the first time, in the history of the
world, that the same phenomenon has been witnessed. It was seen in
Imperial Rome; it was seen, again, in the "Protestant Rome," Geneva.
Wherever are gathered together an exceedingly fine race of people, the
flower of the race, individuals of the highest mental and moral
distinction, there the birth-rate falls steadily. Vice or virtue alike
avails nothing