deceive him wholly now, for no one
thinks of practicing it.«
    »One result which must follow from the independence of women I can see for
myself,« I said. »There can be no marriages now except those of inclination.«
    »That is a matter of course,« replied Dr. Leete.
    »Think of a world in which there are nothing but matches of pure love! Ah
me, Dr. Leete, how far you are from being able to understand what an astonishing
phenomenon such a world seems to a man of the nineteenth century!«
    »I can, however, to some extent, imagine it,« replied the doctor. »But the
fact you celebrate, that there are nothing but love matches, means even more,
perhaps, than you probably at first realize. It means that for the first time in
human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve
and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out,
has unhindered operation. The necessities of poverty, the need of having a home,
no longer tempt women to accept as the fathers of their children men whom they
neither can love nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from
personal qualities. Gold no longer gilds the straitened forehead of the fool.
The gifts of person, mind, and disposition; beauty, wit, eloquence, kindness,
generosity, geniality, courage, are sure of transmission to posterity. Every
generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last. The attributes
that human nature admires are preserved, those that repel it are left behind.
There are, of course, a great many women who with love must mingle admiration,
and seek to wed greatly, but these not the less obey the same law, for to wed
greatly now is not to marry men of fortune or title, but those who have risen
above their fellows by the solidity or brilliance of their services to humanity.
These form nowadays the only aristocracy with which alliance is distinction.
    You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical superiority of our
people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of the causes I
mentioned then as tending to race purification has been the effect of
untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive
generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people you
will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and moral improvement. It
would be strange if it were not so, for not only is one of the great laws of
nature