zen seemed dull enough; but from citizen to God--what
intoxication of zest does this thought engender! Can the creature dare
it? Is this the great venture? Is this the meaning of the travail of
the ages? Or is it only a process from citizen to man, from tamed beast
to free spirit feeling the Soul of All at the inmost centre of himself,
and finding the means at last of incarnating that soul in the
community, in politics, trade, and domestic life? Howsoever the new
facts and the newer outlook are to be interpreted, it becomes quite
clear that if civilization was the taming of beasts, something that is
not civilization has begun to assert itself. The liberating of
citizens, as it moves to triumphant attainment, must scrap many an
institution, many a habit, and set up the reverse of many a rule of
conduct. We have indeed reached a new era, one which is not that of
taming animals, when young women can--and know that they can--as
war-brides strike against the labor of maternity and against the
foreseen horror of a fate for one's offspring such as they would never
choose for the fruit of their love.

But, secondly, close upon the invention of means for controlling the
transmission of life has followed the idea that this control shall not
rest with the individuals most intimately concerned, but with the will
of the community--of the nation--of federated humanity. If a man has no
exclusive right to do as he pleases with his power of labor, to
withhold it or direct it irrespective of the general welfare and the
will of the commonweal, how much less, say the advocates of eugenic
marriage, shall men and women be permitted to follow their own whim and
their selfish pleasure as regards the use or waste of the power to
communicate life? This new doctrine that men are only trustees for the
nation and posterity in their central power to control the future
quantity and quality of human beings whom they may bring into
existence, recognizes no division of society into the tamed and the
tamers. There is no class suggested of monopolists of social power who
will regulate the rest of the community, as the owner of cattle
controls the breeding of them. The general will of the community,
administered under diffused public opinion and through the educated
judgment of the individual himself, will decide. Only in cases of what
are agreed to be downright crimes will the law step in to condemn and
prevent, and then only through agents who are dire