the civil contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between
the parties, and a religious rite to render the same perpetual,
and there it is too apt to end.

So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect
on the race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be
anything, the second must in the end be everything. For however
trifling it be in the individual instance, it goes on accumulating
with each successive generation, like compound interest.
The choosing of a wife by family suffrage is not simply an exponent
of the impersonal state of things, it is a power toward bringing
such a state of things about. A hermit seldom develops to his full
possibilities, and the domestic variety is no exception to the rule.
A man who is linked to some one that toward him remains a cipher
lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor is he more
favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been
similarly circumscribed.

As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in
to further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of
demonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond
our power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere
skeletons of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of
the science of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to
generalize from our own premises, only rising above them
sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates.
Such a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field of view
appears perfectly plain.

Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position,