III. What are the changes that we may expect from the substantial perfecting of human nature and society? If, before making this forecast, we reflect with what feeble means the race has arrived at its present knowledge of useful and important truths, we shall not fear the reproach of temerity in our anticipations for a time when the force of all these means shall have been indefinitely increased. The progress of agricultural science will make the same land more productive, and the same labour more efficient. Nay, who shall predict what the art of converting elementary substances into food for our use may one day become? The constant tendency of population to advance to the limits of the means of subsistence thus amplified, will be checked by a rising consciousness in men, that if they have obligations in respect of creatures still unborn, these obligations consist in giving them, not existence but happiness, in adding to the wellbeing of the family, and not cumbering the earth with useless and unfortunate beings. This changed view upon population will partly follow from the substitution of rational ideas for those prejudices which have penetrated morals with an austerity that is corrupting and degrading.[77] The movement will be further aided by one of the most important steps in human progress--the destruction, namely, of the prejudices that have established inequality of rights between the two sexes, and which are so mischievous even to the sex that seems to be most favoured.[78] We seek in vain for any justification of such an inequality in difference of physical organisation, in force of intelligence, or in moral sensibility. It has no other origin than abuse of strength, and it is to no purpose that attempts are made to excuse it by sophisms. The destruction of the usages springing from this custom will render common those domestic virtues which are the foundation of all others, and will encourage education as well as make it more general, both because instruction would be imparted to both sexes with more equality, and because it cannot become general even for males without the aid of the mother of the family.[79] Among other improvements under our third head will be the attainment of greater perfection in language, leading at once to increased accuracy and increased concision. Laws and institutions, following the progress of knowledge, will be constantly undergoing modifications tending to identify individual with collective interests. Wars will grow less frequent with the extinction of those ideas of hereditary and dynastic rights, that have occasioned so many bloody contests. The art of learning will be facilitated by the institution of a Universal Language; and the art of teaching by resort to Technical Methods, or systems which unite in orderly arrangement a great number of different objects, so that their relations are perceived at a single glance.[80]