ery cowardly or brutal assaults of any sort, the
men of the future may consider pain a salutary remedy, at least during
the ages of transition while the brute is still at large. But since most
acts of this sort done under conditions that neither torture nor
exasperate, point to an essential vileness in the perpetrator, I am
inclined to think that even in these cases the men of the coming time
will be far less disposed to torture than to kill. They will have
another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain _for the
sake of the pain_ is against the better nature of man, and it is unsafe
and demoralizing for any one to undertake this duty. To kill under the
seemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing. The
rulers of the future will grudge making good people into jailers,
warders, punishment-dealers, nurses, and attendants on the bad. People
who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the
lives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment even
to-day, but the men of the New Republic will have the courage of their
opinions.

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 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 v