Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/72

68 of marriage until the young people can begin life upon the same plane as their parents, too often resulting in an abandonment of marriage altogether, and almost always in a limitation of the family. Why can not young men and women return to the simpler ideals of "love in a cottage" and leave ostentation, if it be necessary at all, to their elders? The French and Chinese custom of giving financial assistance to children during the first years of marriage is commendable as tending to perpetuate families of ability, but the method of bestowing dots has the counterbalancing disadvantage of reacting unfavorably upon the parents, by a restriction of the number of children in a zeal to enlarge the dowry.

Unfortunately those youths who are destined for the more exacting professions are now obliged to spend a long unproductive period in education. While the past generation of A.B.'s, after leaving college at about twenty, found immediately open to them some field of professional usefulness, the young man of the present is compelled more and more to supplement his bachelor's degree by some definite technical training, or, if he seeks livelihood in the academic world, he must usually add to his previous study years of advanced research. Marriage is thus unduly delayed among the young men of greatest social value. Our universities, in granting many fellowships too small for the support of a wife, are increasing this tendency. A practise far more favorable eugenically would be the bestowal of the same income upon fewer men and in amounts large enough to insure a living, increasing the sum with marriage and the birth of children.

The marriage of the finest young women, on the other hand, is often delayed and sometimes even prevented by an exaltation of the "career" at the expense of wifehood and motherhood. This striving, probably propagated more in radical feminist circles than in the colleges themselves, leads some women of the highest ability and character to remain celibate, or if married to be content with but one or two children. The various movements for the higher education of women, with all their furthering of social progress, are doubtless partly responsible by their emphasis on "culture" and neglect of the training for the work of wife and mother. The large proportion of women professors and instructors in the women's colleges has the unfortunate effect of exalting "careers" for women.

While due care must be observed not to lose sight of the qualitative principle in sexual selection, by an encouragement of too early marriages, yet it is clear that fecundal selection can work satisfactorily only when the superior men and women marry in time to more than replace themselves by their children.

The whole factor of reproductive selection, both sexual and fecundal, is, to sum up, a greater power in modern life than lethal, often called