sic to Socialism, much that is
said is, as the author himself announces in his introduction, purely the
personal opinion of the writer. With these a translator, however, much
in general and fundamental accord, may not always agree. Not agreeing,
he is in duty bound to modify the ethic formula to the extent of marking
his exception, lest the general accord, implied in the act of
translating, be construed into specific approval of objected-to passages
and views. Mindful of a translator's duties as well as rights, I have
reduced to a small number, and entered in the shape of running footnotes
to the text, the dissent I thought necessary to the passages that to me
seemed most objectionable in matters not related to the main question;
and, as to matters related to the main question, rather than enter
dissent in running footnotes, I have reserved for this place a summary
of my own private views on the family of the future.

It is an error to imagine that, in its spiral course, society ever
returns to where it started from. The spiral never returns upon its own
track. Obedient to the law of social evolution, the race often is
forced, in the course of its onward march, to drop much that is good,
but also much that is bad. The bad, it is hoped, is dropped for all
time; but the good, when picked up again, never is picked up as
originally dropped. Between the original dropping and return to its
vicinity along the tracks of the spiral, fresh elements join. These new
accretions so transmute whatever is re-picked up that it is essentially
remodeled. The "Communism," for instance, that the race is now heading
toward, is, materially, a different article from the "Communism" it once
left behind. We move in an upward spiral. No doubt moral concepts are
the reflex of material possibilities. But, for one thing, moral concepts
are in themselves a powerful force, often hard to distinguish in their
effect from material ones; and, for another, these material
possibilities unfold material facts, secrets of Nature, that go to
enrich the treasury of science, and quicken the moral sense. Of such
material facts are the discoveries in embryology and kindred branches.
They reveal the grave fact, previously reckoned with in the matter of
the breeding of domestic animals, that the act of impregnation is an act
of inoculation. This fact, absolutely material, furnishes a
post-discovered material basis for a pre-surmised moral concept,--the
"oneness of fl