In all societies, however wisely controlled and directed, there are certain to be thousands of malcontents. Those malcontents who owe their position of failure, obscurity, or impotence to circumstances over which no organised community ever has had or ever can have control, are however easily won over to an attack upon society, if they can be shown by unscrupulous or incompetent thinkers that their position is due, not to an essential law of life or nature, but to the peculiar conventions or rules regulating the community of which they happen to form a part. Men who are congenitally inefficient, beneath even mediocre attainments in their intelligence, their physical strength or their health, very naturally find [p112] themselves relegated to inferior responsibilities, subordinate places and menial tasks. In any community in which there is a high appreciation of quality, or a conscious effort towards good qualitative results--and no other community is worth considering--this must be so. Now nothing is easier, nevertheless, than to convince this class of malcontents that their subordinate positions and menial tasks are the result of a social rather than of a natural injustice, and the dishonesty of Communistic propaganda, consists very largely in the fact that it will not scruple to delude this class of malcontents into believing that in a perfectly realisable ideal state of society their disabilities would be removed. Nay, it goes further than that, it adds to the small list of remediable injustices which are really of man’s creating, the long list of gross injustices which are the work of life and nature, and flinging the whole sum of these injustices at the head of society, leads the ignorant and the thoughtless to believe that the grand total of the account can legitimately be charged against man and his institutions. And this brings us to the next step in the argument. So far we have seen:-- (_a_). That procreation acts as a perturbing force in society, and that in its consequences it is therefore an act of violence. (_b_). That tradition and recent investigation lead us to believe that it is not advisable to meddle with the individual’s sacred right over his procreative powers. (_c_). That therefore in any community where [p113] the individual’s right to parenthood is regarded as inviolable, violence must reverberate throughout the whole social structure and in its repercussions must impinge with more or less severity against individuals. The next step in the argument is the consequence of (_c_) and it is that where there is violence, however slight or however carefully regulated, its results must redound with more or less severity to the disadvantage of certain individuals, that is to say, _there must be someone or some group that suffers_. And this appears to be another of the fundamental social truths without allowing for which it seems hopeless to set forth to rebuild society.