"You have said that human institutions are only waiting for their transformation," Renan replied. "An institution represents a need. It has been formed by the spontaneous action of the community; but the moment it has been thus constituted it becomes fixed, and ceases to represent the living, developing forces which deposited it. Christianity at first was perfectly fluid; the teaching of Paul was unsystematic, local, momentary; but Christianity became a religion, not of inspiration but of authority, it crystallised into an hierarchy and perished. In the same way the idyll of St Francis and his companions crystallised into an order, and perished. They exist among us as monuments, these institutions; but the same forces which crystallised them are now dissolving them; the moment they cut themselves off from the stream of life they perished. I do not think that the future will differ essentially from the past. Socialism is simply the cry of the poor against the rich. Dives is well-clad and fares sumptuously every day; no other crime is alleged against him, but these are sufficient to ensure his damnation. Perhaps the maker of the parable saw some peculiar virtue in poverty and suffering, which filled the heart with a spiritual grace, and uplifted it with moral fortitude. Perhaps he saw the wealth of Dives as poverty, as a lack of spiritual experience. "Socialism, however, does not share this view; on the contrary, it asserts that wealth is the sole condition of spiritual grace and moral fortitude, and it is therefore bent on sharing with Dives the good things of this world. Consequently socialism has against it the two most deeply-rooted of human instincts, the instinct of acquisition and the family instinct; because it denies the right of possession and the right of bequest. How deeply-rooted the notion of property is we can see exemplified in France, where the abolition of the right of primogeniture has not had the effect which was expected of it, even the peasants in certain departments having held out against it. But if the power of bequest were entirely abolished, would people marry? The object for a legalised relation is gone, and the production of our kind becomes subject to the hazard of personal choice. It is possible that the State would have to intervene and make maternity an honourable profession under its own control, and that Plato's ideal of the State as a foster-mother would be realised. This notion has, I confess, a singular attraction for me. The substitution of a stock derived from careful selection of parents for our present inferior stock; the careful breeding of an aristocratic caste, appeals to the imagination, as it shows the State actually realising what has always been its ideal.