The fact that after all these reforms, however, there will still remain a residuum of violence in all civilisation, which it will be impossible altogether to eliminate, so long as nations recognise the individual’s inviolable right to parenthood, should nevertheless be carefully remembered and reckoned with; for, both as a check upon any too romantic schemes of our own, as well as a means with which to criticise our enemies’ proposals, the recollection of this unpleasant but ineluctable principle is one of the most valuable measures of caution by which it is possible for us to abide; and he who, by forgetting it, fancies he has discovered a royal road to his Utopia, will find perhaps too late that life, nature and society are not easily made the sport of false ideals and shallow fantasies, but are ruled by inexorable and frequently unpleasant laws the rigour of which it is safer to acknowledge than to ignore. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 19: The present writer has purposely avoided reducing the violence to an act of depredation in regard to food, air and space; although in a steadily increasing community, which is the only healthy community, surrounded by other steadily increasing communities, this aspect of the question would have to be taken into account. In such a community every baby born may rightly be said to constitute a menace to every other baby’s food, air and space. Nor has any mention been made of the multiplication of people who become a burden to the rest of the community by the sheer inferiority of their physique. But again in their case provision would have to be made by the administrators of a Socialistic State, just as it is made by capitalistic States; and the parents of such physically inferior people would thus, by the act of procreation alone, have pressed a burden upon their fellow citizens which would virtually amount to an act of violence against them. Though the parents of such physically inferior people might scruple to put their hands in their fellow members’ pockets for food or money, by means of their offspring they thus indirectly perpetrate a predatory act against them.] [Footnote 20: There are reasons for believing that Socialists promise to make it cease altogether among human beings.] [Footnote 21: The wisdom of ancient societies in never checking or limiting this right is now becoming more than ever apparent in the light that psycho-analysis has thrown upon the disastrous effects of interfering too drastically with this function in human beings.] [Footnote 22: Sufferers and suffering are to be understood here as of a kind which the inequalities of life and nature alone bring about--not the sufferers and suffering resulting from ordinary human passions and the accidents of their manifestation: love, hate, indifference, childlessness, spinsterhood, etc.; for it is presumed that no reformer has ever been so foolish as to pretend that he could eliminate these.]