Page:Kwaidan; Stories and Studies of Strange Things - Hearn - 1904.djvu/264

 will be effected at the cost of human fertility. But this decline in reproductive power will not, we are told, be sufficient to assure the very highest social conditions: it will only relieve that pressure of population which has been the main cause of human suffering. The state of perfect social equilibrium will be approached, but never quite reached, by mankind—

Unless there be discovered some means of solving economic problems, just as social insects have solved them, by the suppression of sex-life.

Supposing that such a discovery were made, and that the human race should decide to arrest the development of sex in the majority of its young,—so as to effect a transference of those forces, now demanded by sex-life, to the development of higher activities,—might not the result be an eventual state of polymorphism, like that of ants? And, in such event, might not the Coming Race be indeed represented in its higher types,—through feminine rather than masculine evolution,—by a majority of beings of neither sex?

Considering how many persons, even now, through merely unselfish (not to speak of religious) motives, sentence themselves to 238