These are not the pretensions indeed of the present system such as it is, but they are the facts. And even the present disorder, one gathers, is unstable. One hears on every hand of its further decadence. From Father Vaughan to President Roosevelt, and volleying from the whole bench of bishops, comes the witness to that. Not only the old breaches grow wider and more frequent, but in the very penetralia of the family the decay goes on. The birth-rate falls—and falls. The family fails more and more in its essential object. This is a process absolutely independent of any Socialist propaganda; it is part of the normal development of the existing social and economic system. It makes for sterilization, for furtive wantonness and dishonour. The existing system produces no remedies at all. Prominent people break out ever and again into vehement scoldings of this phenomenon; the newspapers and magazines re-echo “Race Suicide,” but there is no sign whatever in the statistical curves of the smallest decimal per cent. of response to these exhortations. Our existing sexual order is a system in decay. What are the alternatives to its steady process of collapse? That is the question we have to ask ourselves. To heap foul abuse, as many quite honest but terror-stricken people seem disposed to do, on any one who attempts to discuss any alternative, is simply to accelerate this process. To me it seems there are three main directions along which things may go in the future, and between which rational men have to choose. The first is to regard the present process as inevitable and moving towards the elimination of weak and gentle types, to clear one’s mind of the prejudices of one’s time, and to contemplate a disintegration of all the realities of the family into an epoch of Free Love, mitigated by mercantile necessities and a few transparent hypocrisies. Rich men will be free to live lives of irresponsible polygamy; poor men will do what they can; women’s life will be adventurous, the population will decline in numbers and perhaps in quality. (To guard against that mischievous quoter who lies in wait for all Socialist writers, let me say at once that this state of affairs is anti-socialist, is, I believe, socially destructive, and does not commend itself to me at all.)