Marriage Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

A Victorian scientist arguing against marriage bans is doing more than pleading for tolerance; he is defending a theory of social change that runs deeper than policy. Alfred Russel Wallace, a co-discoverer of natural selection and an obsessive classifier of how environments shape life, treats “prohibitory marriage laws” like a blunt instrument: they may restrain behavior, but they don’t improve the conditions that produce it. The sentence is built as a pivot from coercion to cultivation. “What we need are not…” clears the throat like a lab report rejecting a bad method, then offers a replacement: reform the ecosystem.

The key phrase is “educated public opinion,” a Victorian-era power center that operates without police. Wallace’s intent is to shift authority from the state to the social conscience, but that’s not purely liberal. “Public opinion” can be a soft form of discipline, and “teach individual duty” frames intimacy as a moral obligation to be learned, monitored, and performed. He’s rejecting legal prohibition while still insisting on regulation - just outsourced to culture, schooling, and social pressure.

Context matters: late-19th-century Britain was awash in anxiety about “degeneration,” eugenic thinking, and campaigns to manage sexuality through law. Wallace famously broke with hardline Darwinists on some social questions and carried a reformist streak (land reform, critiques of inequality). Here he’s trying to keep the conversation from collapsing into punitive legalism, while retaining a moral project: change society first, and private behavior will follow. It’s a progressive move with a paternalistic edge, and that tension is exactly why the line still lands.