Before they have done, our philanthropic locusts will have eaten off every green blade and leaf of human initiative, and will leave the Society which they so yearn to serve barren and blight-stricken, perhaps for centuries to come. Of what value to any one is such a Society? What in fact, _exists_, but individuals? And mark: there is no retracing our steps if we go too far in this direction. We are always assured that there would be a reaction against a too great restriction of the human spirit. But that is true only so long as the restriction is more or less a novelty and is _not_ too great. Directly it becomes really extreme, there is no reaction. We can see this in the innumerable nations of antiquity and of today which have remained stagnant for hundreds and hundreds of years. Lack of human rights tends progressively to stifle the spirit that would demand or respect them. Even in England, whose history is that of the struggle for liberty, we have seen how, in women, that spirit has been weakened. How then are we to hope—after a too deep descent to Avernus—for a return towards the light and inspiration of freedom? It is expecting a result without a cause—or rather in the teeth of one. Like Xerxes, stupidly confident, we burn our boats behind us. Or, more accurately, Nature burns them for us. She seems to say: “Very well; if you don’t want to give scope to original minds, you have only to make your social conditions accordingly—subordinate your individual ruthlessly to what you call ‘the common good’—and original minds will never trouble you again. Not only will your organization suppress them, but it will gradually destroy your power even to produce them. That will save _them_ an immensity of trouble, and prevent all hitches in your boring routine. If that’s what you want, it is easily yours.” But our reformers _don’t_ exactly want that. They like to have it both ways. They want a subservient, State-ridden community of highly individualized human beings, who—like the inmates of Barry’s Home for Geniuses—would initiate punctually and spontaneously to order—in the approved direction, of course. No fantastic unexpected nonsense would be tolerated for a moment!