There is nothing the present writer deprecates more sincerely than an appeal to the emotions alone. He is aware that in the above paragraph he has made a frank appeal to the emotions. But surely in this particular instance it is amply justified? Having made [p117] his principal intellectual appeal, he now confronts his readers with the æsthetic aspect of the alternatives proposed. For is not life and the enjoyment of life largely a question of æsthetics? Is not our emotional nature competent therefore to decide upon a question of taste or pleasure? Life offers many alternatives; human life presents hundreds of possibilities. In the end it is our emotional nature and our æsthetic sense that decide which road leads to the greatest amount of happiness, although the intellect may have directed us all along. Can we really suppose then, that a change that can cut at the root of so much virtue and so much traditional sentiment, can possibly be one that is going to bring us happiness? And even in its inevitable repercussions--the inequalities and injustices of which so much has been said above--has the free operation of the individual’s right to parenthood not also immense advantages? In nature it is the violence and inexorable character of the forces at play that give life its manifold beauties and contrasts, the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the lakes, the tableland and the gorge, the forest and the open plain. In the animal world it is the difference between the tiger and the antelope, the vulture and the hare, the lion and the jackal, that lends to life that panoramic charm of variegated virtue and adaptation to ends. While in the domain of plants it is the divergences of the oak from the shrub, of the palm from the cactus, of the poplar from the plum tree, that combine to produce that harmony and dissonance which the landscape painter converts into graphic music. [p118]