"If, from one point of view, this is apt to shock a _timorous_ and _unreflecting_ mind, by asserting that the most cherished of our affections might have been, under _certain_ circumstances, a vicious piece of self-indulgence, and its place in the scale of morality taken by what is _now_ the most atrocious kind of crime; nevertheless, from another point of view, such an assertion is as reassuring as the most absolute of moralists could desire, for it is tantamount to saying that the foundations of morality, the distinctions of right and wrong, are deeply laid in the very conditions of social existence; that there is, in the face of these conditions, a positive and definite difference between the moral and the immoral, the virtuous and the vicious, the right and the wrong, in the actions of individuals partaking of that social existence." This is very well. It is so _now_, because of the traditional sentiments and principles which still retain their force--but how long will it continue? I invite attention to the following passage from Mr Hepworth Dixon's "New America" (vol. i. p. 312, 6th edition), which I must say struck me very forcibly when I read it. He narrates a conversation which he had with Brigham Young on the subject of incest:--"Speaking for himself, not for the church, he (Brigham Young) said he saw _none at all_ (_i.e._ no objection at all). He added, however, that he would not do it himself,--'my prejudices prevent me.'" Upon which Mr Hepworth Dixon observes-- "This _remnant_ of an old feeling brought from the Gentile world, _and this alone_, would seem to prevent the saints (Mormons) from rushing into the higher forms of incest. How long will these Gentile sentiments remain in force? 'You will find here,' said elder Stenhouse to me, talking on another subject, 'polygamists of the third generation. When these boys and girls grow up and marry, you will have in these valleys the _true feeling_ of patriarchal life. The _old world is about us yet_, and we are always thinking of what people may say in the Scottish hills and the Midland shires.'" Here, and in the previous extract, we seem to catch glimpses of what the morality of the future is likely to be, at any rate in such matters as infanticide and incest, if old notions are to be discarded, and men are left, in each generation, to no higher rule than their own individual calculation as to pleasure and pain, or to the prevailing sense or determination of the community as to what the conditions of utility may permit.