One of the most important theses advanced in _Romantic Love and
Personal Beauty_ (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being
merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful
agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the
reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the
insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to
perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals
and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled to survive, marry, and
hand down their infirmities to future generations. As a mediator
between these two agencies, love comes in; for Cupid, as I have said,
"does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of health and
beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of
single-blessedness;" which in these days is not such a hardship as it
used to be. This thought will be enlarged in the last chapter of the
present volume, on the "Utility and Future of Love," which will
indicate how the amorous sense is becoming more and more fastidious
and beneficial. In the same chapter attention will be called, for the
first time, to the three great strata in the evolution of parental
love and morality. In the first, represented by savages, parents think
chiefly of their own comfort, and children get the minimum of
attention consistent with their preservation. In the second, which
includes most of the modern Europeans and Americans, parents exercise
care that their children shall make an advantageous marriage--that is
a marriage which shall secure them wealth or comfort; but the
frequency with which girls are married off to old, infirm, or unworthy
men, shows how few parents as yet have a thought of their
_grandchildren_. In the next stage of moral evolution, which we are
now entering, the grandchildren's welfare also will be considered. In
consequence of the persistent failure to consider the grandchildren,
the human race is now anything but a model of physical, intellectual,
and moral perfection. Luckily love, even in its sensual stages, has
counteracted this parental selfishness and myopia by inducing young
folks to marry for health, youth, and beauty, and creating an aversion
to old age, disease, and deformity. As love becomes more and more
fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral
beauty--that is becomes Romantic Love--its sway becomes greater and
greater, and the time will come when questions relating to it will
form the most important chapters in treatises on moral philosophy,
which now usually ignore them altogether.