, which in your day was the animating idea
of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood
and common interest among living men, but equally to any realization of
the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow. To-day
this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all previous
ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race,
reinforcing, with an intense conviction of duty, the natural impulse to
seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex. The result is,
that not all the encouragements and incentives of every sort which we
have provided to develop industry, talent, genius, excellence of
whatever kind, are comparable in their effect on our young men with the
fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the race and reserve
themselves to reward the winners. Of all the whips, and spurs, and
baits, and prizes, there is none like the thought of the radiant faces
which the laggards will find averted.

"Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men who have failed to acquit
themselves creditably in the work of life. The woman must be a
courageous one, with a very evil sort of courage, too, whom pity for
one of these unfortunates should lead to defy the opinion of her
generation--for otherwise she is free--so far as to accept him for a
husband. I should add that, more exacting and difficult to resist than
any other element in that opinion, she would find the sentiment of her
own sex. Our women have risen to the full height of their
responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping
the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this
respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in
which they educate their daughters from childhood."

After going to my room that night, I sat up late to read a romance of
Berrian, handed me by Dr. Leete, the plot of which turned on a
situation suggested by his last words, concerning the modern view of
parental responsibility. A similar situation would almost certainly
have been treated by a nineteenth century romancist so as to excite the
morbid sympathy of the reader with the sentimental selfishness of the
lovers, and his resentment toward the unwritten law which they
outraged. I need not describe--for who has not read "Ruth Elton"?--how
different is the course which Berrian takes, and with what tremendous
effect he enforces the principle which he states: "Over the unborn our