nds infect their wives, who have no
kind of protection or remedy, and the wicked, grinning face of the law
looks on, and says "She is his wife; all is well." If we had courage
instead of cowardice--the capital mark of an age that has no organ voice
but many steam whistles--we could accelerate incalculably the gradual
decrease of these diseases. The body of eugenic opinion which is being
made and multiplied might succeed in allying the Church and Medicine and
the Law, with splendid and lasting effect. But we spend thousands of
pounds in estimating correlations between hair colour and
conscientiousness, fertility and longevity, stature and the number of
domestic servants, and so forth, meanwhile protesting against too hasty
attempts to guide public opinion on these refined matters; and this
tremendous eugenic reform, which awaits the emergence of some courage
somewhere, is left altogether out of account. There was no allusion to
the existence of venereal disease, far and away the most appalling of
what I have called dysgenic forces, in any official eugenic publication
until April, 1909, when in the Eugenics Review we dared to make a
cautious and half-ashamed beginning; half-ashamed to stand up against
syphilis and gonorrh[oe]a. When one thinks of the things that we are not
ashamed to do, as individuals or as nations, it is to reflect that
perhaps we have "let the tiger die" too utterly, and that just as woman
is ceasing to be a mammal, man is perhaps ceasing to be even a
vertebrate. Is there no Archbishop or Principal of a University or Chief
Justice or popular novelist or preacher or omnipotent editor, boasting a
backbone still, who will serve not only his day and generation but all
future days and generations, by devoting himself and his powers to this
long-delayed campaign wherein, if it be but undertaken, success is
certain, and reward so glorious?[14]

CHAPTER XVI

ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND

Brief reference was made in a previous chapter to woman's great function
of choosing the fathers of the future. Here we must discuss, at due
length, her choice of a companion for life. It is repeatedly argued, by
critics of any new idea, that the eugenist, in his concern for the race,
is blind to the natural interests and needs of the individual; that "we
are all to be married to each other by the police," as an irresponsible
jester has declared; that the sanctities of love are to be profaned or
its imperatives defied. Eve