Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/176

 ness in life we must go back to the days, before animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming mass of bacteria.

To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so, we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the cities—whichever they may be—wherein dwell the highest products of our civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired. Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to be our active aim to make that road for both of them—socially though not individually—the Road to Destruction.

To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by diminishing the production of