Starting out then with this original act of violence which is rooted in life and in Nature and enters into every form of human society willy nilly, it is obvious that its reverberations must proceed rhythmically throughout all the sections of any human community whatsoever, be its organisation what you will. Thus inequalities, apparent injustices and even bondage, appear only as the necessary ultimate repercussions of the original perturbing influence. And in every society hitherto, such regrettable repercussions of the original act of violence have always been regarded as inevitable. As a rule the authorities have, according to their lights, endeavoured to mitigate the asperity of these perturbations; but to eliminate them completely they have always known is an impossible achievement, _because they are not man-made, but created by the laws of life itself_. All societies hitherto appear to have recognised with varying degrees of liberality the sacredness of man’s right over his procreative powers. But what a large number of recent sociological thinkers appear to have forgotten is, that since procreation and its [p109] consequences are part of the original elements of life and nature, which are allowed to persist in the more or less artificial arrangement called society, this artificial arrangement must partake of the harshness, the inequalities and the apparent injustices of life and nature, to the extent to which it allows these original elements of life and nature to operate freely in its midst. To check procreation, or limit it by law, would involve the violation of the sanctity which has hitherto been accepted as the one attribute shielding every man’s right over his procreative powers.[21] Acquiescing in the inviolability of this right, then, the utmost society could do, was to mitigate the worst consequences of its free operation, by ordering as far as possible the union of couples, and by properly allocating the general burden of responsibility for the support of the offspring arising from these unions. Albeit no amount of order introduced into the joining of couples, could possibly place a check upon man’s procreative powers when once he had fulfilled all the formalities that the State demanded; consequently, despite all its attempts to regulate the relations of the sexes, society’s ultimate control over the act of procreation and its results remain more or less ineffectual, and in so far as it attempts to establish any reasonable proportion between a man’s powers of procreating and his powers of providing for the consequences of his act--or for that matter his children’s power of providing for themselves in after life--the outcome of all society’s efforts have been practically nil.