Closely allied with the welfare of the child is another “reform” with which Wallace’s name will long be associated.  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.

He further held that “although many women now remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are always considerable numbers who feel no strong impulse to marriage, and accept husbands to secure subsistence and a home of their own rather than from personal affection or sexual emotion.  In a state of society in which all women were economically independent, where all were fully occupied with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly probable that the numbers of unmarried from choice would increase.  It would probably come to be considered a degradation for any woman to marry a man whom she could not love and esteem, and this reason would tend at least to delay marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner