That is his strong
denunciation of Vaccination. For seven years he laboured to show medical
and scientific men that statistics proved beyond doubt the futility of
this measure to prevent disease. A few were converted, but public
opinion is hard to move.
In his ideal of the future, Dr. Wallace gave a large and honoured sphere
to women. He considered that it was in the highest degree presumptuous
and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most
vital and most sacred of all human relationships, regardless of the fact
that our present phase of social development is not only extremely
imperfect, but, as already shown, vicious and rotten to the core. How
could it be possible to determine by legislation those relations of the
sexes which shall be best alike for individuals and for the race in a
society in which a large proportion of our women are forced to work long
hours daily for the barest subsistence, with an almost total absence of
the rational pleasures of life, for the want of which thousands are
driven into uncongenial marriages in order to secure some amount of
personal independence or physical well-being. He believed that when men
and women are, for the first time in the course of civilisation, equally
free to follow their best impulses; when idleness and vicious and
hurtful luxury on the one hand, and oppressive labour and the dread of
starvation on the other, are alike unknown; when _all_ receive the best
and broadest education that the state of civilisation and knowledge will
admit; when the standard of public opinion is set by the wisest and the
best among us, and that standard is systematically inculcated in the
young--then we shall find that a system of truly "Natural Selection" (a
term that Wallace preferred to "Eugenics," which he utterly disliked)
will come spontaneously into action which will tend steadily to
eliminate the lower, the less developed, or in any way defective types
of men, and will thus continuously raise the physical, moral, and
intellectual standard of the race.
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