If the Lords fail us, the simplest method is to do away with them. If individual enterprise falls short of its promise, a clamour is raised for its abolition. Family life goes wrong, married life goes wrong, and the remedy suggested is to make the dissolution of the marriage tie easier. It does not matter whether you are destroying a portion of your organism and therefore impoverishing yourself thereby, for you are simplifying your task, and this for an invalid is an achievement of maximum importance. Everything thus falls into a process of general disintegration, all troublesome appendages are sloughed off, and the body of civilisation is gradually truncated or dissolved. Meanwhile, however, since every step in this process of decomposition receives the most convincing intellectual support, no one suspects that there are other and better methods of setting to work. It never occurs to the typical modern mind that if institutions are to be abolished as fast as degenerate people show themselves unable to uphold them, then an immediate and far more speedy way of refuting and abolishing all civilisation would be to fill all its leading positions, and to invest all its institutions, with raw savages from the Cannibal Isles. Every institution and tradition would then break down, and presumably the modern mind would be satisfied that the only remedy [p31] would consist in the abolition of all institutions and traditions. Long ago the present writer pointed out that to set a buffoon on the throne is not to confute monarchy, and yet this is the principle we work upon in all our reforms. We never once question whether it may not be modern man himself who is wrong or decadent. This at least might lead us to look in the proper direction for improvement. We merely assail with savage fury every institution that modern man can no longer run to his and our own satisfaction. Thus the instinctive and morbid indolence of sickness, to which amputation and suppression are naturally the most tempting corrective methods, becomes the standard of judgment for all ills; and where ignorant minds are added to sick minds, the natural bankruptcy of ignorance joins hands with the destructive lust of the sick, and the two together, hatchet in hand, set out to “reform” the world. Can anyone doubt that this is indeed what we are witnessing on all sides? And does not the very specious seductiveness of the Socialist and Bolshevist propaganda lead us to suspect that here, at least, we are invalids listening to invalids?