Thus in a healthy society, which is an increasing society, procreation is not merely a transitory but a perpetual source of violence. The present writer is not arguing that this is right or wrong; he is only trying to state a fact. Whether it be a pleasant fact, or a desirable fact, is for the moment beside the point. It is at all events a fundamental truth of life, and as such it would be idle to devise any new scheme of society in which it is not allowed for. It may be objected that the whole of a man’s offspring in modern society may elude their destiny of impinging violently against that society by becoming emigrants. This appears to be forcible enough. But is not emigration in itself merely a means of postponing the act of violence by one stage? Besides, is not emigration--say to the colonies--possible to-day only because we happen to be living at a period subsequent to an act of violence on a grand scale, by which the land constituting the colonies, whether of France, England, Holland, or Italy, was wrested from other people? And even so, have we not seen recently, during a time of serious unemployment in England, certain politicians object to Mr. Lloyd George’s schemes of emigration on the ground that, to send our unemployed to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, where labour conditions were also unfavourable, would be an act of provocation to those colonies?--Why an act of provocation?--Because to impose a number of extra mouths on a community unless there is a genuine industrial demand in that community for the able bodies possessing those mouths, is an act of gratuitous violence. It serves no purpose to revile life and the world because we happen to have lighted upon a fundamental fact that is unpleasant to our cultivated sensibilities. Life is as it is, and Nature is as it is, and no bewailing or reviling on our parts will alter them. The brave attitude, the healthy attitude, indeed the only dignified attitude, is to accept life and Nature as they are, and to endeavour to discover the most desirable method of dealing with both of them. This primary act of violence, which is procreation, cannot be cancelled out or annulled; it cannot be expunged from the essential character of existence. It must be accepted. This much, however, should be immediately understood; _you cannot have at the very portals of life an act of violence, and hope to build upon it a form of society in which violence in some form, however attenuated, [p108] will not appear_. To make any promises to this effect is the plainest humbug. It may appear an alluring prospect; it may sound an attractive picture; it may deceive and it may delude; but it is an impossible undertaking notwithstanding; and those who declare that they are prepared to embark upon it are either too ill-informed to realise the true data of their problem, too dishonest to admit that they know these true data, or too inept properly to deal with them.