Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/82

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Personal Beauty

ory of eugenics, any more than he was in other matters. The needs, after elimination of the clearly unfit, are two. First, to insure that marriages shall be made on the basis of mutual attraction of beauty alone, excluding all interference of national, family, social, religious, or economic motives. Second, to take care that the unions of the most fit shall be fruitful, and relatively more fruitful than those of the less fit.

The world at the present time is overpopulated. Man has obeyed the injunction to “multiply and replenish the earth,” and having succeeded in replenishing the globe in full and over full measure, has gone right on multiplying. Even wars and pestilences have not prevented the earth’s population from becoming too numerous. And although pestilences may be mostly short-circuited by medical skill, war is inevitable when national domains are so overcrowded that further increase is possible only through depredation on, or conquest of, other peoples. If it had not been for the unnecessary multiplication of the German people, Germany would have had no occasion to attempt to conquer her neighbors, and would have had no occasion therefore to develop the philosophy of schrecklichkeit to make her barbarities possible.

The margin of living at the present time is very small. Land everywhere is becoming impoverished, and available new lands are becoming less.