So far the Socialist’s proposals appear to contain no measures for ridding human stock of its pronounced inequalities. It is, however, from inequalities that apparent injustices and violence ultimately arise. Men of great talent and men of the most miserable endowments, will continue to be born in any State, whether Socialistic or capitalistic. So long as the individual right to procreate be admitted there will continue to be pressed into the community, not only the offspring of the virtuous man, the sage, and the craftsman, but also the offspring of the knave, the mediocre and the fool. So long as the individual’s right to parenthood is accepted as inviolable, society will therefore continue to be perturbed as it is now by an uninvited access of one, two or even half a dozen to a dozen, new mouths, from certain individuals, the low quality of whose accompanying bodies may be out of all proportion (in regard to the services they can render) to the high quantity of food and other supplies they can account for. New members will be forced into the community by procreation which, according to the quality of [p103] their endowments will either considerably enhance its efficiency or considerably cripple it. If they are to enhance it, and it is in the interest of the community that they should enhance it, then they will require to be encouraged for so doing; on the other hand, if they are going to cripple it, their crippling influence will recoil on each member of the social body, and each will suffer from the presence of the new arrivals. Further to elucidate this point, let two extreme examples be given:-- (1). A man of singularly high gifts, C by name, presses upon the community in his lifetime eight children all of which take more or less after him. Their endowments are so conspicuous that they plainly overshadow all the other higher men of the community. It happens, moreover, that the community has reached a crisis in its affairs when it urgently needs men of C’s type. Obviously then C, by presenting the community with eight singularly gifted replicas of himself, has profoundly affected its life and its constitution. By elevating the standard of the administrative work, some of the whilom administrators will have been driven from office and forced to take up an inferior form of service. A perturbation will have occurred. In its ultimate analysis it will have amounted to a coercive act, an act which though tolerated by the State (assumed in this case to admit the individual’s right to procreate) thus turns out to be an act of violence. It was not deliberate, or of a kind savouring of malice aforethought, but it is nevertheless an act which forces a change on the community at large, and a marked change of position on a [p104] certain number of the community’s members. It is therefore tantamount to an act of violence: it is in fact an act of violence.