Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/66

62 Beauty of face still carries far too much weight as a desideratum for matrimony, but this quality is not without some eugenic value. Far more serious is the modern tendency to substitute for mere beauty another characteristic which, for want of a better name, we may term flashiness. In our sober moments we all recognize the flashy man or woman as per se inferior, but it is undeniable that, other things being equal, the matrimonial chances of this class are above, rather than below the average. There is hope in the consideration that this demand is largely artificial, stimulated by the press, the popular magazine, and, above all, the stage. A moment's recollection of the standard of sexual desirability displayed in the ordinary farce will illustrate forcibly the disparity between the artificial qualities there emphasized and the characteristics really desired by the general public in wife or husband.

Along with a shifting of values from this false emphasis there is needed the general cultivation of conscious selection, this again depending largely upon the attitude of the press and the stage. While a large percentage of our current witticisms inculcate the cynical, and many of our novels and plays, the fatalistic view of marriage, it is not to be wondered at that sexual selection still falls far short of the ideal.

Although an elevation of standard is of preeminent value not only for eugenic, but for social progress, it is obvious that too rigid a criterion might have the effect of leaving many desirables unmated. We must balance this tendency, therefore, by doing away with certain obstacles to free sexual selection which have hitherto worked to produce celibacy in superior men and women.

Social caste lines, for example, if closely drawn, tend to leave unmarried many individuals who, though unable to find mates in their own class, might easily do so in another: the diplomat's daughter whom propriety forbids to fall in love with her father's secretary, and the butler's daughter to whom exceptional endowment has made distasteful the suitors of her own walk of life, are alike the victims of convention, their line being extinguished in this way as effectively as if they were undesirables.

Extreme inequality of wealth has an even more unfortunate effect, as confining choice within limits much more arbitrary than those of hereditary class, and thus keeping possible mates in widely distant spheres. Such luxuries as the parlor car, the country estate and the many-barriered ocean steamer have fixed a gulf between the millionaire and the lower middle class that is seldom traversed matrimonially except through the medium of the stage.

While the legislative interests of the eugenicist and the social reformer here again coincide in their common opposition to extreme inequalities of wealth and rank, something may be accomplished even