Volume 1

Studies scientific & social / by Alfred Russel Wallace.

  • Alfred Russel Wallace
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies scientific & social / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    equilibrium between the birth and death rates will then be brought about by a combination of physical and social agencies, and the bugbear of over-population become finally extinct.1 How Natural Selection will improve the Race. There now only remains for consideration the means by which, in such a society, a continuous improvement of the race could be brought about, on the assumption that for this purpose education is powerless as a direct agency, since its effects are not hereditary, and that some form of selection is an absolute necessity. This improvement I believe will certainly be effected through the agency of female choice in marriage. Let us, therefore, consider how this would probably act. It will be generally admitted that, although many women now remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are always a considerable number who feel no strong inclination to marriage, and who accept husbands to secure a subsistence or a home of their own rather than from personal affection or sexual emotion. In a society in which women were all pecuniarily independent, were all fully occupied with public duties and intellectual or social enjoyments, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being, we may be sure that the number of the unmarried from choice would largely increase. It would probably come to be considered a de¬ gradation for any woman to marry a man she could not both love and esteem, and this feeling would supply ample reasons for either abstaining from marriage altogether or delaying it till a worthy and sympathetic husband was encountered. In man, on the other hand, the passion of love is more general, and usually stronger ; and as in such a society as is here postulated there would be no way of gratifying this passion but by marriage, almost every woman would receive offers, and thus a powerful selective agencv would rest with the female sex. Under the ] A Theory of Population deduced from the General Late of Animal Fertility. Republished from the Westminster Review for April, 1852.