ed.

If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men of the future,
on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under no
circumstances find the birth of a child, healthy in body and brain, more
than the most venial of offences. But birth gives only the beginning,
the raw material, of a civilized man. The perfect civilized man is not
only a sound strong body but a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is a
fabric of moral suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine of
more or less systematized ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training and
an aesthetic culture. He is the child not only of parents but of a home
and of an education. He has to be carefully guarded from physical and
moral contagions. A reasonable probability of ensuring home and
education and protection without any parasitic dependence on people
outside the kin of the child, will be a necessary condition to a moral
birth under such general principles as we have supposed. Now, this
sweeps out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people as the late
Mr. Grant Allen is supposed to have advocated--but, so far as I can
understand him, did not. But whether it works out to the taking over of
the permanent monogamic marriage of the old morality, as a going
concern, is another matter. Upon this matter I must confess my views of
the trend of things in the future do not seem to be finally shaped. The
question involves very obscure physiological and psychological
considerations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally pries into
these matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often hard
to come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be paired
off in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamic
homes for their sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certain
freedom of regrouping were possible within a time limit, this might be
so. But I am convinced that a large proportion of married couples in the
world to-day are not completely and happily matched, that there is much
mutual limitation, mutual annulment and mutual exasperation. Home with
an atmosphere of contention is worse than none for the child, and it is
the interest of the child, and that alone, that will be the test of all
these things. I do not think that the arrangement in couples is
universally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by sterile vice)
should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of two
childless