Summing up, therefore, we may predict the immediate future somewhat as follows: Coming into contact with the increased facilities for freedom of action to which reference has been made, the new itch to regulate men’s lives will lead to persecution and heresy-hunting. Men will be hounded out of public life because of their private morals, and acceptance of certain habits of belief and codes of conduct will be made indispensable to the holding of public appointments. Instead of choosing for a post the man who is best qualified to do the job, we shall choose the man who most nearly reflects the habits of thought and conduct of the selection board, that is to say, of the herd who elected the selection board to represent them. The growth of Puritanism will bring a growth in hypocrisy, a fruitful and invaluable offshoot of Puritanism. There will be an even greater disparity between men’s practices and their professions than there is at present, and their professions will tend increasingly to condemn their practices. The world, in short will become a paradise for the average man and a hell for the exceptional one. So much we may expect during the next fifty years. If, however, I am asked which of the two opposing tendencies I have attempted to describe in this book will ultimately prevail, my answer is that it will not be the bourgeois Puritanism whose apparent victory I foresee in the immediate future. Nor, indeed, do I think that that victory will be more than apparent. The history of morals, like that of politics, follows the swing of the pendulum, and some reaction on the part of each generation from the habits of its fathers seems to be inevitable. In so reacting it reverts to those of its fathers’ fathers. Thus each generation tends to take the gods of its grandfathers from the shelf upon which its fathers have placed them. To-day we are at the beginning of a period of reaction from the license of the War. The difference between young people of between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and their predecessors of seven years ago is very marked. The latter were casual, offhand, and easy-going. They observed little ceremonial in their relationships with each other, smoked, flirted and made love when and where they pleased, married in haste and repented at leisure or dispensed with marriage altogether, and despised rather than revered the aged to whom they were a constant source of horror and amazement. What is perhaps most noticeable about their successors to-day is their improvement in manners. They are chivalrous to women, considerate to the old, maintain a decorum at dances which is positively Victorian, and instead of hastening to establish sexual relations with whomsoever attracts them, have actually gone out of their way to postpone the fruition of their desires by a reintroduction of the rite known as “engagement”.