cosmic forces and microbes) are nowadays
conquered by the human brain, and wars are seldom waged except between
great empires, a fact which will sooner or later reduce them to
absurdity. For this reason the morality of the god of war and of
patriotic chauvinism has had his day and loses more and more his
reason for existence. Modern ethics has already become a social and
international human ethics, and will become more so in the future.

As in olden times a true hero knew how to combine love of his wife
with love for his country, to obtain in his conjugal union the
strength to fight for his ideal, so our modern love will serve to
stimulate us in the pursuit of an ideal, in our fight for social
welfare. Man and woman must fight side by side, as this struggle
requires from both an intense and lifelong effort. But it is precisely
in this effort, in this work, that they will obtain their highest
enjoyment. This effort supports and strengthens not only the muscles,
but especially the mind, the cerebral energy.

The struggle for social welfare prepares for us the highest and most
ideal joy. It teaches man to master himself, to overcome his natural
idleness, his desire for pleasure, his dependence on all kinds of
futile habits and base appetites. It educates his will, curbs his weak
and egoistic sentiments, while exercising his faculty for creating
good and useful works. Thanks to this incessant strife, a brain of
even mediocre quality may become a useful social instrument.

I ask in all sincerity if, living in the way we have just described, a
man will find the time and inclination to indulge in the love stories
which the novels of our libraries offer to readers of both sexes for
their daily consumption? I reply: if the man is normal, no. It is only
pathological natures, with their exaggerated sentiment and morbid
passions, which remain incapable of mastering their passionate
emotionalism and reducing it to silence. Other individuals, normal or
semi-normal, are artificially urged to exaggerated exaltation in the
sexual domain by idleness, by reading pernicious novels which excite
their sexual appetite and their sentimentality, also by the artificial
life and feverish activity of life in cities.

Work in itself is not sufficient, and every one ought to add social
work to his ordinary occupation. In fact, the monotony of any special
occupation, and even the exclusive work of a scientific speciality,
ends by giving the cereb