Personally I do not see how we can quarrel with the general ideas that the younger generation has as to its ethical problem—that is, that there is no indubitable religious or other authoritarian sanction for any specific rules of conduct; that different ethical codes have best suited different peoples, times, and conditions; that the best test of any hypothesis is whether it will work; and that in a world in flux there is no reason for positing and insisting upon an eternally fixed code of ethics. We do know that such codes will gradually alter in any case. The question is whether it is possible to use intelligence in altering them or whether we have to trust to the slow process of an unintelligent alteration. If they do gradually get adjusted to new social conditions and structures,[Pg 76] then it is reasonable to suppose that such an adjustment should bear some time relation to the rapidity of change in society. With the increasing speeding up both of thought and of scientific discovery, the rate of change in society is also speeding up enormously. Unless we can assist intelligently the process of adjusting ethical ideas and codes to the social change, the amount of injustice and individual maladjustments, emotional, economic, and other, may increase so rapidly as to endanger the social structure itself. The economic independence of the younger generation of women has already profoundly altered the whole family relation and that of the two sexes. The motor car, whether one likes it or not, has almost equally altered the whole question of the supervision of the two sexes at an earlier stage. Again, whether one likes it or not, the scientific investigations now being carried on in several parts of the world into the question of methods of birth control may have still more profound effects within the lifetime of the coming generation. The changes which have come already since the Industrial Revolution and the harnessing of steam are probably nothing to what we may expect within the next generation if the present rate of discovery and alteration continues. To say that rules of personal conduct established under sanctions which no longer exist for most people, and for conditions which have already been changed almost beyond recognition, must last unaltered forever is simply to refuse to see the facts and to court disaster, individual or social.