individual choice, so as to say what marriages should take place, but it would certainly claim to say what marriages should not take place. Every intelligent society, socialist or other, would consider it as a first duty to prohibit unsocial unions, would prevent the propagation of physical, mental and moral disease. I do not say that such restraints need depend on legislation, though legal restraints are clearly justifiable; the voice of public opinion in an educated community, the majesty of the venerable Mrs. Grundy herself, might suffice to maintain and to improve the physical fitness of the race by imposing sterility upon the physically unfit of each generation. Mr. Kidd seems to think that nature has got to work in the same blind, crude, wasteful fashion when she is operating through self-conscious reasonable man as when she is operating on the lowest amoeba. He seems to think that legislative restrictions upon populations would be in some sense interferences with the course of nature, or to use a phase of Mr. Spencer, attempts "to fight against the constitution of things." But the social will expressing itself either by public opinion or through an act of parliament is just as much a natural force as any other, and by a favorable disposition of physiological conditions is capable of securing physical progress.
Taking a wide perspective we have before us two alternative views of social progress—one quantitative, the other qualitative.
Quantitative progress says; "Breed freely, so that those below the physical average may be killed off and the stronger may multiply, and bursting the too narrow limits of their original home may swarm and encroach upon the lands of feebler folk, ruthlessly extirpating these natives when the latter stand in the way of their ascendency, or else compelling them to toil and to give up the profits of their labor to the owners of Maxim guns and superior machinery."
This progress is measured in square miles of territory, bales of cotton goods and millions of low class English lives, which are engaged in cut-throat competition of military or commercial rivalry. This appears to be Mr. Kidd's way of measuring progress.
Qualitative progress consists in limiting the quantity of new
