"In _your_ plane of existence!" he retorted. "In Ante-land the movement has spread widely; scarcely a soul but has become convinced of the evils of compulsion in this most personal matter, and of the necessity of having a voice in its own incarnation. And it is I, _moi qui vous parle_, who have sown the seeds of the revolt against our present social arrangements. Too long had parents presumed upon the ignorance and helplessness of the unborn and upon their failure to combine. But now the great wave of emancipation which is lifting us all off our feet has reached the coming race. And soon the old ideal will be nothing but a strangled snake by the cradle of Hercules." "Why, I never heard of such a thing in all my born days!" I cried helplessly. "Of course not; you are more ignorant than the babe unborn. You trouble yourself about the next world, but as to what may be going on in the last world, that never enters your head. But for the tyranny of outward social forms you and I might have deferred our birth till a serener century. Henceforth the dreamer of dreams will have only himself to blame if he is born out of his due time and called upon to set the crooked straight. Job himself would have escaped his misfortunes if he had only had the patience to wait. In future any one who is born in a hurry will be a born idiot." "What! Will the unborn choose the time of birth as well as their parents?" "One is implicated in the other. Suppose the soul wished to be the son of an American Duke, naturally it would have to wait till aristocracy was developed across the Atlantic, say some time in the next century." "I see. And is there a public opinion in Ante-land that regulates private action?" "Yes, but I have now educated it to the higher ethics. It used to be the respectable thing to be born of strangers without one's own consent, though at the bottom of their souls many persons believed this to be sheer immorality, and cursed the day they were led to the cradle, and became the mere playthings of the parents who acquired them--pretty toys to be dandled and caressed, just a larger variety of doll. But all this is almost over. Henceforth birth will be considered immoral unless it is spontaneous--the outcome of an intelligent selection of parents, based on love." "On love?" "Yes; should not a child love its father and mother? and how can we expect it to love people it has never seen, to whom it is tied in the most brutal way, without a voice in the control of its destinies at the absolutely most important turning-point of its whole existence?" "True, a child should love its parents," I conceded. "But is not the quiet, sober affection that springs up after birth, an affection founded on mutual association and mutual esteem, better than all the tempestuous ardours of pre-natal passion that may not survive the christening?"