Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Date:
- 1913
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.
143/180 page 131
![XVI] Progress Through Selection work that many thousands of the women and young girls are driven on the streets as the only means of breaking the monot¬ ony of their unceasing labour and obtain¬ ing some taste of the enjoyments of life at whatever cost ; and then ask himself if the Legislature which cannot remedy this state of things should venture to meddle with the great problems of marriage and the sanctities of family life. Is it not a hideous mockery that the successive Governments which for forty years have seen the people they profess to govern so driven to despair by the vile conditions of their existence that in an ever larger and larger proportion they seek death by suicide as their only means of escape—that Governments which have done nothing to put an end to this continuous horror of starvation and suicide, should be thought capable of remedying some of its more terrible results, while leaving its causes absolutely untouched ? It is my firm conviction, for reasons I shall give farther on, that, when we have cleansed the Augean stable of our present social organisation, and have made such arrangements that all shall contri¬ bute their share either of physical or 131 \](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0144.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
