To deny it may sound pleasant, kind, humane, charitable, and chivalrous; but it is not candid; and although to the ignorant, to the sentimental and the thoughtless, that which is pleasant frequently makes the appeal of truth itself, in the end that man or party who is not straightforward about these matters is bound to be discovered and reviled. Those therefore who wish to reform all future societies, and who wish to make it unnecessary for sufferers or suffering to exist in the world, except at the will of the legislature, can do so only in one of two ways.[22] Either they must close the backdoor through which the violence of nature and life enters the community--that backdoor being the free operation of the right to parenthood--or else they must do what no society hitherto has ventured to do, _i.e._, they must determine by law beforehand who is and who is not to be sacrificed. The suffering which in society is the necessary outcome of the act of violence which is procreation, that suffering which is the only means of balancing this violence, does not necessarily fall on the heads of all. It selects its victims as it were with a certain caprice. And hitherto, while endeavouring to mitigate the severity of it as far as possible, society has been content to leave its incidence more or less to chance, to the blind forces which ultimately determine, as they do in nature, the fate of all individual beings. It is only in war time, when the kind of person to be sacrificed for the whole is definitely indicated, that society proceeds by legislation to select those who should suffer from those who should be spared. And even then, a certain element of chance remains over by means of which it is possible for large numbers of young men to escape the ultimate price. If, however, it is proposed to reform society so that it shall either contain no violence, or that the effects of that violence shall be annulled for the majority by legislative means, then whatever the Socialist or Communist may have to say to the contrary, this can be done only in one of two ways: (_a_) Either man’s right to parenthood must be violated. (_b_) Or the section of society which is to be sacrificed to balance the original act of violence must be deliberately decided upon by legislative means. [p115] And since these are the only two alternatives, the Socialist, the Communist, and the Bolshevist, are just as hopelessly committed to them as any other advocate of a new social scheme, from which the inequalities and injustices inseparable from all human communities heretofore are to be absent. _The fact that they are impossible alternatives invalidates the whole of the Socialist and Communist’s position._