Page:Across the Zodiac (Volume 1).djvu/141

 order concentrated men's energies on the production of material wealth and the achievement of physical comfort and ease. Looking forward to nothing after death, they could only make the best of the short life permitted to them and do their utmost to lengthen it. In the assurance of speedy separation, affection became a source of much more anxiety and sorrow than happiness. All ties being precarious and their endurance short, their force became less and less; till the utmost enjoyment of the longest possible life for himself became the sole, or almost the sole, animating motive, the one paramount interest, of each individual. The equality which logic had established between the sexes dissolved the family tie. It was impossible for law to dictate the conditions on which two free and equal individuals should live together, merely because they differed in sex. All the State could do it did; it insisted on a provision for the children. But when parental affection was extinguished, such provision could only be secured by handing over the infant and its portion to the guardianship of the State. As children were troublesome and noisy, the practice of giving them up to public officers to be brought up in vast nurseries regulated on the strictest scientific principles became the general rule, and was soon regarded as a duty; what was at first almost openly avowed selfishness soon justifying and glorifying itself on the ground that the children were better off under the care of those whose undivided attention was given to them, and in establishments where everything was regulated with sole regard to their welfare, than they could be at home. No law compels us to send our children to these establish-