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 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 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.

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