Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/89

 Rh These professional entertainers are practically lost to posterity. While they are actively before the public they do not reproduce, and if they leave the stage or the cabaret for marriage, it is usually marriage of the nonfertile kind. Apparently, thousands of these selected females enter the profession every year; the very ones who, on Plato’s plan would be picked out above all others for the perpetuation of the race being thus eliminated almost completely.

The proportion of the female population which possesses distinctive beauty is never large in any community. If one will stand on a street which, like Fifth Avenue in New York, or Charles Street, in Baltimore, is a route of feminine parade, and count the number of women whom he or she would class as “really beautiful” the truth of this generalization will be borne in on him. He will realize, in particular, that a majority vote of women would never favor a style of dress which should reveal the form any more than at present, and