y. The hangman, if he made
his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his office permanence
and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet with public
approbation, i.e., men obviously of sound stock and talents, i.e., the
sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he made his selection by
the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out of a hat, or by
any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance would fall
indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper orders would thus
lose their present comparative immunity. True enough, a good many men
would endeavour to influence him privately to their own advantage, and
it is probable that he would occasionally succumb, but it must be plain
that the men most likely to prevail in that enterprise would not be
philosophers, but politicians, and so there would be some benefit to
the race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss when
a Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an ambassador or
Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert Spencer goes to the
grave without leaving sons behind him there is a detriment to all the
generations of the future.

I did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practical
politics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis, to help clarify the
problem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but its
execution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also by
a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least
offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite
its unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the
substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle for
the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly,
that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman
or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favourable to her
opportunities. And men would oppose it because it would restrict their
liberty. This liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its common
manifestation, it is no more, at bottom, than the privilege of being
bamboozled and made a mock of by the first woman who ventures to essay
the business. But none the less it is quite as precious to menas any
other of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their enchantment.
They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters into the
matter, and that under volition there is not only a hig