Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/96

 In the various economic grades of society, incidental financial resources play their part in the selection of males. In the melodrama, the beautiful heroine in the end accepts the personally desirable, but poor, hero, to the discomfiture of the wealthy, but sexually undesirable, rival. In real life, what ought to occur does not occur so uniformly. Youth, in which the preservative forces of nature are more abundant, has more intelligence in regard to all the details of mating and in regard to many details in the rearing of children; but the reprehensible philosophy of age sicklies the flame of youth with its pale cast, even where it does not resort to the forces of authority and economic control.

War, with all its evils, has brought a freshening of the sexual interests of women, and lent its support to the natural tendency to select for the race. In the military profession in time of war, the male personal qualities which preserve the stock come once more into the prominence they possessed in less civilized societies, and from which the machine-like organization of modern industrialism has driven them. It may well be that these qualities have no fuller scope or power in modern armies than in modern civil life. This is immaterial. The fact is that the glamor of ancient methods of combat still hangs about the military service, and these personal qualities attain thereby