for passionless purposes,
people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to follow
ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in
love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in
their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selective
births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity
averse from this most fundamental aspect of existence....

5

It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of the
position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about all these
intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that
led me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged from
the region of academic and timid discussion into the field of practical
politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end,
and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a
broader and colder view of things that first determined me in my attempt
to graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British
Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is
possible to estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.

I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal
education grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is but
a short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality of
births in the community, and from that again to these forbidden and
fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and the family organisation.
A sporadic discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, a
Eugenic society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and the
Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly magazines.
But beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless people
in general--one never addressed them in particular--nothing was done
towards arresting those adverse processes. Almost against my natural
inclination, I found myself forced to go into these things. I came to
the conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. It
wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and well
trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised state.
Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its intimate
substance, and unless it was presently to collap