<p>And the type of men that I conceive emerging in the coming years will
deal simply and logically not only with the business of death, but with
birth. At present the sexual morality of the civilized world is the most
illogical and incoherent system of wild permissions and insane
prohibitions, foolish tolerance and ruthless cruelty that it is possible
to imagine. Our current civilization is a sexual lunatic. And it has
lost its reason in this respect under the stresses of the new birth of
things, largely through the difficulties that have stood in the way, and
do still, in a diminishing degree, stand in the way of any sane
discussion of the matter as a whole. To approach it is to approach
excitement. So few people seem to be leading happy and healthy sexual
lives that to mention the very word "sexual" is to set them stirring, to
brighten the eye, lower the voice, and blanch or flush the cheek with a
flavour of guilt. We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and
hiding<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></SPAN></span> our shames. One of the most curious revelations of this fact
occurred only a few years ago, when the artless outpourings in fiction
of certain young women who had failed to find light on problems that
pressed upon them for solution (and which it was certainly their
business as possible wives and mothers to solve) roused all sorts of
respectable people to a quite insane vehemence of condemnation. Now,
there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for the
preservation of decency, and for a far more stringent suppression of
matter that is merely intended to excite than at present obtains, and
the chief of these reasons lies in the need of preserving the young from
a premature awakening, and indeed, in the interests of civilization, in
positively delaying the period of awakening, retarding maturity and
lengthening the period of growth and preparation as much as possible.
But purity and innocence may be prolonged too late; innocence is really
no more becoming to adults than a rattle or a rubber consoler, and the
bashfulness that hampers this discussion, that permits it only in a
furtive silly sort of way, has its ugly consequences in shames and
cruelties, in miserable households and pitiful crises, in the production
of countless, needless, and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carry
our decency so far as to make it suggestive and stimulating in a
non-natural way; we invest the plain business of reproduction with a
mystic religious quality far more unwholesome than a savage nakedness
could possibly be.</p>
<p><span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></SPAN></span>The essential aspect of all this wild and windy business of the sexual
relations is, after all, births. Upon this plain fact the people of the
emergent New Republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre-eminent value of
sexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which will
constitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we can
dissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questions
become of no more importance than the morality of one's deportment at
chess, or the general morality of outdoor games. Indeed, then the
question of sexual relationships would be entirely on all fours with,
and probably very analogous to, the question of golf. In each case it
would be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far the
thing was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive
bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy. An able-bodied man
continually addicted to love-making that had no result in offspring
would be just as silly and morally objectionable as an able-bodied man
who devoted his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf-links.
But no more. Both would probably be wasting the lives of other human
beings—the golfer must employ his caddie. It is entirely the matter of
births, and a further consideration to be presently discussed, that
makes this analogy untrue. It does not, however, make it so untrue as to
do away with the probability that in many cases the emergent men of the
new<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></SPAN></span> time will consider sterile gratification a moral and legitimate
thing. St. Paul tells us that it is better to marry than to burn, but to
beget children on that account will appear, I imagine, to these coming
men as an absolutely loathsome proceeding. They will stifle no spread of
knowledge that will diminish the swarming misery of childhood in the
slums, they will regard the disinclination of the witless "Society"
woman to become a mother as a most amiable trait in her folly. In our
bashfulness about these things we talk an abominable lot of nonsense;
all this uproar one hears about the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit
and the future of the lower races takes on an entirely different
complexion directly we face known, if indelicate, facts. Most of the
human types, that by civilized standards are undesirable, are quite
willing to die out through such suppressions if the world will only
encourage them a little. They multiply in sheer ignorance, but they do
not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be made to dread
it. Sensuality aims not at life, but at itself. I believe that the men
of the New Republic will deliberately shape their public policy along
these lines. They will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all
places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land
legislation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter
on the move; they will see to it that no parent can make a profit out of
a child, so that childbearing<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></SPAN></span> shall cease to be a hopeful speculation
for the unemployed poor; and they will make the maintenance of a child
the first charge upon the parents who have brought it into the world.
Only in this way can progress escape being clogged by the products of
the security it creates. The development of science has lifted famine
and pestilence from the shoulders of man, and it will yet lift war—for
some other end than to give him a spell of promiscuous and finally cruel
and horrible reproduction.</p>
<p>No doubt the sentimentalist and all whose moral sense has been
vigorously trained in the old school will find this rather a dreadful
suggestion; it amounts to saying that for the Abyss to become a "hotbed"
of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of the
ruling class in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminating
evil. At present the Abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and too
often fearfully miserable children. <i>That</i> is something more than a
sentimental horror. Under the really very horrible morality of to-day,
the spectacle of a mean-spirited, under-sized, diseased little man,
quite incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married to
some underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and diseased little woman,
and guilty of the lives of ten or twelve ugly ailing children, is
regarded as an extremely edifying spectacle, and the two parents
consider their reproductive excesses as giving them a distinct claim
upon less fecund and<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></SPAN></span> more prosperous people. Benevolent persons throw
themselves with peculiar ardour into a case of this sort, and quite
passionate efforts are made to strengthen the mother against further
eventualities and protect the children until they attain to nubile
years. Until the attention of the benevolent persons is presently
distracted by a new case.... Yet so powerful is the suggestion of
current opinions that few people seem to see nowadays just what a
horrible and criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the point of
view of social physiology, appears.</p>
<p>And directly such principles as these come into effective operation, and
I believe that the next hundred years will see this new phase of the
human history beginning, there will recommence a process of physical and
mental improvement in mankind, a raising and elaboration of the average
man, that has virtually been in suspense during the greater portion of
the historical period. It is possible that in the last hundred years, in
the more civilized states of the world, the average of humanity has
positively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our religious teachers,
seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to preserve an atmosphere of
mystical ignorance about these matters, which, in view of the
irresistible nature of the sexual impulse, results in a swelling tide of
miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half
the population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or
tempted to evade reproduction!<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></SPAN></span> This thing, this euthanasia of the weak
and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate
the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I
have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and
achieved.</p>
<p>If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men of the future,
on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under no
circumstances find the birth of a child, healthy in body and brain, more
than the most venial of offences. But birth gives only the beginning,
the raw material, of a civilized man. The perfect civilized man is not
only a sound strong body but a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is a
fabric of moral suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine of
more or less systematized ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training and
an æsthetic culture. He is the child not only of parents but of a home
and of an education. He has to be carefully guarded from physical and
moral contagions. A reasonable probability of ensuring home and
education and protection without any parasitic dependence on people
outside the kin of the child, will be a necessary condition to a moral
birth under such general principles as we have supposed. Now, this
sweeps out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people as the late
Mr. Grant Allen is supposed to have advocated—but, so far as I can
understand him, did not. But whether it works out to the taking over of
the permanent monogamic marriage of the old<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></SPAN></span> morality, as a going
concern, is another matter. Upon this matter I must confess my views of
the trend of things in the future do not seem to be finally shaped. The
question involves very obscure physiological and psychological
considerations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally pries into
these matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often hard
to come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be paired
off in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamic
homes for their sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certain
freedom of regrouping were possible within a time limit, this might be
so. But I am convinced that a large proportion of married couples in the
world to-day are not completely and happily matched, that there is much
mutual limitation, mutual annulment and mutual exasperation. Home with
an atmosphere of contention is worse than none for the child, and it is
the interest of the child, and that alone, that will be the test of all
these things. I do not think that the arrangement in couples is
universally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by sterile vice)
should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of two
childless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit an
ampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the economic
disadvantage of women, which makes wifehood the chief feminine
profession, while only for an incidental sort<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></SPAN></span> of man is marriage a
source of income, and further by the fact that most women have a period
of maximum attractiveness after which it would be grossly unfair to cast
them aside. From the point of view we are discussing, the efficient
mother who can make the best of her children, is the most important sort
of person in the state. She is a primary necessity to the coming
civilization. Can the wife in any sort of polygamic arrangement, or a
woman of no assured status, attain to the maternal possibilities of the
ideal monogamic wife? One is disposed to answer, No. But then, on the
other hand, does the ordinary monogamic wife do that? We are dealing
with the finer people of the future, strongly individualized people, who
will be much freer from stereotyped moral suggestions and much less
inclined to be dealt with wholesale than the people of to-day.</p>
<p>I have already shown cause in these Anticipations to expect a period of
disorder and hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality. I am inclined to
think that, when the New Republic emerges on the other side of this
disorder, there will be a great number of marriage contracts possible
between men and women, and that the strong arm of the State will insist
only upon one thing—the security and welfare of the child. The
inevitable removal of births from the sphere of an uncontrollable
Providence to the category of deliberate acts, will enormously enhance
the responsibility of the parent—and of the State<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></SPAN></span> that has failed to
adequately discourage the philoprogenitiveness of the parent—towards
the child. Having permitted the child to come into existence, public
policy and the older standard of justice alike demand, under these new
conditions, that it must be fed, cherished, and educated, not merely up
to a respectable minimum, but to the full height of its possibilities.
The State will, therefore, be the reserve guardian of all children. If
they are being undernourished, if their education is being neglected,
the State will step in, take over the responsibility of their
management, and enforce their charge upon the parents. The first
liability of a parent will be to his child, and for his child; even the
dues of that darling of our current law, the landlord, will stand second
to that. This conception of the responsibility of the parents and the
State to the child and the future runs quite counter to the general
ideas of to-day. These general ideas distort grim realities. Under the
most pious and amiable professions, all the Christian states of to-day
are, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. The chief result,
though of course it is not the intention, of the activities of priest
and moralist to-day in these matters, is to lure a vast multitude of
little souls into this world, for whom there is neither sufficient food,
nor love, nor schools, nor any prospect at all in life but the
insufficient bread of servitude. It is a result that endears religion
and purity to the sweating employer,<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></SPAN></span> and leads unimaginative bishops,
who have never missed a meal in their lives, and who know nothing of the
indescribable bitterness of a handicapped entry into this world, to draw
a complacent contrast with irreligious France. It is a result that must
necessarily be recognized in its reality, and faced by these men who
will presently emerge to rule the world; men who will have neither the
plea of ignorance, nor moral stupidity, nor dogmatic revelation to
excuse such elaborate cruelty.</p>
<p>And having set themselves in these ways to raise the quality of human
birth, the New Republicans will see to it that the children who do at
last effectually get born come into a world of spacious opportunity. The
half-educated, unskilled pretenders, professing impossible creeds and
propounding ridiculous curricula, to whom the unhappy parents of to-day
must needs entrust the intelligences of their children; these
heavy-handed barber-surgeons of the mind, these schoolmasters, with
their ragtag and bobtail of sweated and unqualified assistants, will be
succeeded by capable, self-respecting men and women, constituting the
most important profession of the world. The windy pretences of "forming
character," supplying moral training, and so forth, under which the
educationalist of to-day conceals the fact that he is incapable of his
proper task of training, developing and equipping the mind, will no
longer be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be permitted to<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></SPAN></span>
subordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business of his
pupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine his moral training,
beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of a capable
person doing his duty as well as it can be done. He will know that his
utmost province is only a part of the educational process, that equally
important educational influences are the home and the world of thought
about the pupil and himself. The whole world will be thinking and
learning; the old idea of "completing" one's education will have
vanished with the fancy of a static universe; every school will be a
preparatory school, every college. The school and college will probably
give only the keys and apparatus of thought, a necessary language or so,
thoroughly done, a sound mathematical training, drawing, a wide and
reasoned view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, a
training in the use of those stores of fact that science has made. So
equipped, the young man and young woman will go on to the technical
school of their chosen profession, and to the criticism of contemporary
practice for their special efficiency, and to the literature of
contemporary thought for their general development....</p>
<p>And while the emergent New Republic is deciding to provide for the
swarming inferiority of the Abyss, and developing the morality and
educational system of the future, in this fashion, it will be attacking
that mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></SPAN></span> and so
threatening under present conditions. The attack will, of course, be
made along lines that the developing science of economics will trace in
the days immediately before us. A scheme of death duties and of heavy
graduated taxes upon irresponsible incomes, with, perhaps, in addition,
a system of terminable liability for borrowers, will probably suffice to
control the growth of this creditor elephantiasis. The detailed
contrivances are for the specialist to make. If there is such a thing as
bitterness in the public acts of the New Republicans, it will probably
be found in the measures that will be directed against those who are
parasitic, or who attempt to be parasitic, upon the social body, either
by means of gambling, by manipulating the medium of exchange, or by such
interventions upon legitimate transactions as, for example, the legal
trade union in Great Britain contrives in the case of house property and
land. Simply because he fails more often than he succeeds, there is
still a disposition among sentimental people to regard the gambler or
the speculator as rather a dashing, adventurous sort of person, and to
contrast his picturesque gallantry with the sober certainties of honest
men. The men of the New Republic will be obtuse to the glamour of such
romance; they will regard the gambler simply as a mean creature who
hangs about the social body in the hope of getting something for
nothing, who runs risks to filch the possessions of other men, exactly<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></SPAN></span>
as a thief does. They will put the two on a footing, and the generous
gambler, like the kindly drunkard, in the face of their effectual
provision for his little weakness, will cease to complain that his worst
enemy is himself. And, in dealing with speculation, the New Republic
will have the power of an assured faith and purpose, and the resources
of an economic science that is as yet only in its infancy. In such
matters the New Republic will entertain no superstition of <i>laissez
faire</i>. Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and
as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent
but imperfect machine.</p>
<p>And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal
with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle
that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not
as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though
probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world-state
with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads,
its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will,
I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain
standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult, and it will have
cast aside any coddling laws to save adult men from themselves.<SPAN name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</SPAN> It
will tolerate no<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></SPAN></span> dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester,
no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant
plague-preserves. Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship
it will let come—white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be
the test. And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said
that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If
there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the
legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for
the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable
tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible,
we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish
the Jew. We are much more likely to find we have abolished the Caucasian
solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people
take up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about many Jewish
faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew
asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular
tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews
are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and
cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew
is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than
the average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he
is simply on all fours with the short,<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></SPAN></span> dark Welsh. He foregathers with
those of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but so
do the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to
dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of mediævalism, a
sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the present
progress of things. He was the mediæval Liberal; his persistent
existence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days of
their ascendency, and to-day he gives the lie to all our yapping
"nationalisms," and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of
the world-state. He has never been known to burke a school. Much of the
Jew's usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably
lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to
be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so.
But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for the
rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow
people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?</p>
<p>Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it
they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see
it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane,
vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the
future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.</p>
<p>The world has a purpose greater than happiness;<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></SPAN></span> our lives are to serve
God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works
through him to greater issues.... This, I believe, will be the
distinctive quality of the New Republican's belief. And, for that
reason, I have not even speculated whether he will hold any belief in
human immortality or no. He will certainly not believe there is any
<i>post mortem</i> state of rewards and punishments because of his faith in
the sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reaction
between this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives.
Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tend
in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, to
a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may find
that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at present
we have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, the
relevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality
of our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future of
our race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitious
Anticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen in a shallow and
troubled pool.</p>
<p>For that future these men will live and die.</p>
<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
<div class="footnote"><p><SPAN name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></SPAN> As, for example, that God is an omniscient mind. This is
the last vestige of that barbaric theology which regarded God as a
vigorous but uncertain old gentleman with a beard and an inordinate lust
for praise and propitiation. The modern idea is, indeed, scarcely more
reasonable than the one it has replaced. A mind thinks, and feels, and
wills; it passes from phase to phase; thinking and willing are a
succession of mental states which follow and replace one another. But
omniscience is a complete knowledge, not only of the present state, but
of all past and future states, and, since it is all there at any moment,
it cannot conceivably pass from phase to phase, it is stagnant,
infinite, and eternal. An omniscient mind is as impossible, therefore,
as an omnipresent moving body. God is outside our mental scope; only by
faith can we attain Him; our most lucid moments serve only to render
clearer His inaccessibility to our intelligence. We stand a little way
up in a scale of existences that may, indeed, point towards Him, but can
never bring Him to our scope. As the fulness of the conscious mental
existence of a man stands to the subconscious activities of an amœba
or of a visceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other
possible mental existences may stand to us. But such an existence,
inconceivably great as it would be to us, would be scarcely nearer that
transcendental God in whom the serious men of the future will, as a
class, believe.</p>
</div>
<div class="footnote"><p><SPAN name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></SPAN> It is an interesting byway from our main thesis to
speculate on the spiritual pathology of the functionless wealthy, the
half-educated independent women of the middle class, and the people of
the Abyss. While the segregating new middle class, whose religious and
moral development forms our main interest, is developing its spacious
and confident Theism, there will, I imagine, be a steady decay in the
various Protestant congregations. They have played a noble part in the
history of the world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulæ
and organization wax old like a garment. Their moral austerity—that
touch of contempt for the unsubstantial æsthetic, which has always
distinguished Protestantism—is naturally repellent to the irresponsible
rich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face of
Protestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against the
self-indulgent, the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The rich as a
class and the people of the Abyss, so far as they move towards any
existing religious body, will be attracted by the moral kindliness, the
picturesque organization and venerable tradition of the Roman Catholic
Church. We are only in the very beginning of a great Roman Catholic
revival. The diversified countryside of the coming time will show many a
splendid cathedral, many an elaborate monastic palace, towering amidst
the abounding colleges and technical schools. Along the moving platforms
of the urban centre, and athwart the shining advertisements that will
adorn them, will go the ceremonial procession, all glorious with banners
and censer-bearers, and the meek blue-shaven priests and barefooted,
rope-girdled, holy men. And the artful politician of the coming days,
until the broom of the New Republic sweep him up, will arrange the
miraculous planks of his platform always with an eye upon the priest.
Within the ample sheltering arms of the Mother Church many eccentric
cults will develop. The curious may study the works of M. Huysmans to
learn of the mystical propitiation of God, Who made heaven and earth, by
the bedsores of hysterical girls. The future as I see it swarms with
Durtals and Sister Teresas; countless ecstatic nuns, holding their Maker
as it were <i>in deliciæ</i>, will shelter from the world in simple but
costly refuges of refined austerity. Where miracles are needed, miracles
will occur.</p>
<p>Except for a few queer people, nourished on "Maria Monk" and suchlike
anti-papal pornography, I doubt if there will be any Protestants left
among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current
will probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of the
faith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish as
Theosophy. Mrs. Piper (in an inelegant attitude and with only the whites
of her eyes showing) has restored the waning faith of Professor James in
human immortality, and I do not see why that lady should stick at one
dogma amidst the present quite insatiable demand for creeds. Shintoism
and either a cleaned or, more probably, a scented Obi, might in vigorous
hands be pushed to a very considerable success in the coming years; and
I do not see any absolute impossibility in the idea of an after-dinner
witch-smelling in Park Lane with a witchdoctor dressed in feathers. It
might be made amazingly picturesque. People would attend it with an air
of intellectual liberality, not, of course, believing in it absolutely,
but admitting "there must be Something in it." That Something in it!
"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," and after that he is
ready to do anything with his mind and soul. It is by faith we
disbelieve.</p>
<p>And, of course, there will be much outspoken Atheism and Anti-religion
of the type of the Parisian Devil-Worship imbecilities. Young men of
means will determine to be "wicked." They will do silly things that will
strike them as being indecent and blasphemous and dreadful—black masses
and suchlike nonsense—and then they will get scared. The sort of thing
it will be to shock orthodox maiden aunts and make Olympus ring with
laughter. A taking sort of nonsense already loose, I find, among very
young men is to say, "Understand, I am non-moral." Two thoroughly
respectable young gentlemen coming from quite different circles have
recently introduced their souls to me in this same formula. Both, I
rejoice to remark, are married, both are steady and industrious young
men, trustworthy in word and contract, dressed in accordance with
current conceptions, and behaving with perfect decorum. One, no doubt
for sinister ends, aspires to better the world through a Socialistic
propaganda. That is all. But in a tight corner some day that silly
little formula may just suffice to trip up one or other of these men. To
many of the irresponsible rich, however, that little "Understand, I am
non-moral" may prove of priceless worth.</p>
</div>
<div class="footnote"><p><SPAN name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></SPAN> <i>Vide</i> Mr. Archdall Read's excellent and suggestive book,
"The Present Evolution of Man."</p>
</div>
</div>
<h3>THE END</h3>
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