The second direction is towards reaction, an attempt to return to the simple old conceptions of our past, to the patriarchal family, that is to say, of the middle ages. This I take to be the conception of such a Liberal as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, or such a Conservative as Lord Hugh Cecil, and to be also as much idea as one can find underlying most tirades against modern morals. The rights of the parent will be insisted on and restored, and the parent means pretty distinctly the father. Subject to the influence of a powerful and well-organized Church, a rejuvenescent Church, he is to resume that control over wife and children of which the modern State has partially deprived him. The development of secular education is to be arrested, particular stress is to be laid upon the wickedness of any intervention with natural reproductive processes, the spread of knowledge in certain directions is to be made criminal, and early marriages are to be encouraged.... I do not by any means regard this as an impossible programme; I believe that in many directions it is quite a practicable one; it is in harmony with great masses of feeling in the country, and with many natural instincts. It would not of course affect the educated wealthy and leisurely upper class in the community, who would be able and intelligent enough to impose their own private glosses upon its teaching, but it would “moralize” the general population, and reduce them to a state of prolific squalor. Its realization would be, I believe, almost inevitably accompanied by a decline in sanitation, and a correlated rise in birth-rate and death-rate, for life would be cheap, and drainpipes and antiseptics dear, and it is quite conceivable that after some stresses, a very nearly stable social equilibrium would be attained. After all it is this simple sort of life, without drains and without education, with child labour (in the open air for the most part until the eighteenth century—though that is a detail) and a consequent straightforward desire for remunerative children that has been the normal life of humanity for many thousands of years. We might not succeed in getting back to a landed peasantry, we might find large masses of the population would hang up obstinately in industrial towns—towns that in their simple naturalness of congestion might come to resemble the Chinese pattern pretty closely; but I have no doubt we could move far in that direction with very little difficulty indeed.