ctly accountable to
an enlightened and alert public opinion. The retaining of this new
mastery of man over the quantity and quality of human life, by the
communal conscience against all monopolists, is the transcendent
feature of the new order. But if this be so, then trade, our system of
producing and distributing wealth, ceases to be merely a question of
the control of labor and becomes a question of the control of the
transmission of human life. Such control might have been accounted a
possible privilege among Virginian breeders of slaves. But so to regard
it seems monstrous, now that chattel slavery has been universally
condemned, thanks to the triumphant levellers of the last hundred
years. What is more, all trade is beginning to be regarded as a
question ultimately, not of the manufacture of machines and their
products, nor of the propagation of plants and animals, but of the
begetting of spiritual agents, who in their turn are to become the
makers and masters of the universe in which they are to live.

The third characteristic event of our century which is to help us to
slough off civilization, as our ancestors ten thousand years ago rid
themselves of the wild-beast features of barbarism and savagery, is the
awakening of women. Their claim to social initiative and responsibility
is the extremest possible reach of democratic self-assertion. The
remarkable peculiarity of their entrance into trade is not, however,
that they are women, but that they are the one half of mankind who have
never worked for hire, but always from love, and who have desired the
wage less than the approval of those they served. The morals of trade,
as it has existed under the relation of master to wage-earner, even the
ethics of trades-unionism, cannot survive the censure of women, who on
other principles demand for themselves the right of maintenance by the
state to protect them in the bearing and rearing of children and the
making of homes, and the nursing of the wounded and the sick. Now that
women no longer allow themselves as social agents to be ignored, they
will insist that not only the morals of marriage and of democratic
relations must become humane, but that all trade, as well as all
legislation, must be guided by the eugenic motive.

XXIII. FOREIGN TRADE THE BEGETTER OF WARS

I have presumed to say that modern trade discloses civilization in its
acutest form. The strict sobriety of this assertion we cannot, perhaps,
a