th the ancients, the
maintenance of the existing generation was the main consideration, and
patriotism its formula. To Marcus Aurelius, to the Stoics, as later to
the Christians, the subject of all moral duties was the individual
soul, and personal salvation became for centuries the corner-stone of
the ethical structure. Well, all the speculation, all the doctrine,
all the literature based upon that conception has become irrelevant and
meaningless in the light of the new ideal. We no longer conceive the
individual save as one in a chain of births. Fatherless, he is
inconceivable; sonless, he is abortive. His soul, if he have one, is
inseparable from its derivation from the past and its tradition to the
future. His duty, his happiness, his value, are all bound up with the
fact of paternity; and the same, mutatis mutandis, is true of women.
The new generation in a word has a totally new code of ethics; and that
code is directed to the end of the perfection of the race. For, and
this is the second constituent of the modern view, the series of births
is also the vehicle of progress. It is this discovery that gives to
our outlook on life its exhilaration and zest. The ancients conceived
the Golden Age as lying in the past; the men of the Middle Ages removed
it to an imaginary heaven. Both in effect despaired of this world; and
consequently their characteristic philosophy is that of the tub or the
hermitage. So soon as the first flush of youth was past, pessimism
clouded the civilization of Greece and of Rome; and from this
Christianity escaped only to take refuge in an imaginary bliss beyond
the grave. But we, by means of science, have established progress. We
look to a future, a future assured, and a future in this world. Our
eyes are on the coming generations; in them centres our hope and our
duty. To feed them, to clothe them, to educate them, to make them
better than ourselves, to do for them all that has hitherto been so
scandalously neglected, and in doing it to find our own life and our
own satisfaction--that is our task and our privilege, ours of the new
generation.

"And this brings me to the third point in our scheme of life. We
believe in progress; but we do not believe that progress is fated. And
here, too, our outlook is essentially new. Hitherto, the conceptions
of Fate and Providence have divided the empire of the world. We of the
new generation accept neither. We believe neither in a good