In particular, women, no longer treated as the equals of men, are alternatively worshipped and disregarded, blown aloft like soap bubbles or jettisoned as lumber. The reaction, in short, is already well under weigh, and its influence for many years to come will be great. But the normal cycle of action and reaction, of licentious eighteenth and Puritanical nineteenth centuries, depends for its recurrence on the entrance of no new factors; it is bound up that is to say with the property status of women and the production of children as the fruit of sexual intercourse. Once new factors are introduced, it may well be thrown permanently out of gear. Birth control and the economic independence of women are to my mind factors of this kind. The changes they portend are incalculable, and, though their full effects may be delayed for two or three decades, no Puritan revival nor any number of such revivals, whether backed by the law or finding expression in public opinion merely, will in the long run be able to stand against them. * * * * * I am conscious that what I have written in this book will seem to many to be cynical and disruptive. I shall be charged with taking a low view of human nature, and speaking slightingly of morality. My answer is, first, that what I have written of in these pages is not human nature as a whole, but that part of human nature only which expresses itself in what is called morality; and secondly, that what is called morality is not in any true sense of the word morality at all. Morality, as I understand it, is positive: it insists that certain things are good and ought to be pursued even if the heavens fall. But the habits of thought and standards of conduct I have analyzed in this book, although they are called morality, are not positive but negative. Their appeal is to men’s fears rather than to their hopes; they tell them not what they must do to be saved, but what they must not do if they are to avoid the censure of society. Their basis is the instinct to possess, and their weapon the power to blame. Men blame those who claim a liberty they dare not assert for themselves, and dignify with the name of morality the indulgence of possessive instincts in which savages glory without hypocrisy. “What could I have done in the circumstances?” asked the husband of an erring wife in a recent society scandal case. “If you ask me to tell you I will. You could have told your wife that if she went with the man again, you would get her divorced. You could then have gone up to London and assaulted Sir X Y, and to hell with your career”, replied the eminent counsel on the other side.