the inferior, to the damage of posterity. The hangman, if he made
his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his office permanence
and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet with
public approbation, i.e., men obviously of sound stock and talents,
i.e., the sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he made his
selection by the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out of a
hat, or by any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance
would fall indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper
orders would thus lose their present comparative immunity. True
enough, a good many men would endeavour to influence him
privately to their own advantage, and it is probable that he would
occasionally succumb, but it must be plain that the men most likely
to prevail in that enterprise would not be philosophers, but
politicians, and so there would be some benefit to the race even
here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss when a
Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an
ambassador or Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert
Spencer goes to the grave without leaving sons behind him there is a
detriment to all the generations of the future.




I did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practical
politics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis, to help clarify the
problem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but its
execution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also
by a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at
least offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite
its unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose