busy-bodies employ an army of detectives to spy upon couples in the Parks, for fear they should not suffer from lack of housing accommodation so much as is hoped. Female teachers, in most parts of England, are required to be unmarried, which means that they must be childless and either celibate or very skilfully deceptive. It would be no more cruel to insist that they should be blinded or have their hands cut off. Uncivilized races are compelled to work in mines or other industrial enterprises, and are drilled to spread terror and starvation among the weaker nations of Europe. In China, an ancient civilization which has almost all the characteristics that Mr Havelock Ellis admires is being deliberately destroyed by the military and financial ambitions of nations with stronger armies and navies, to the accompaniment of cant about integrity and inde- pendence and the Open Door.
In such a world, all who are not a menace to their neighbours are bound to be exterminated by war or economic pressure. Art is almost extinct; science still flourishes because it ministers to homicide, but must perish when it has perfected its work by destruction. How is one to say, in such a world, "my will is one with the universal will"? Mr Havelock Ellis professes that his mysticism is free from dogma; but if he supposes that we have anything to do with a universal will other than that of organized mankind, he has adopted all that is essential in the dogma of theism. The only "universal will" visible to me is that of human groups, which are all bent upon mutual destruction. With this universal will I am emphatically not at one. Agreeing with Mr Havelock Ellis as to the ends of life, I find it difficult to agree as to means. I believe that those who value these ends must temporarily submit to the yoke of organization and co-operation, since otherwise they will be crushed in detail by clever energetic maniacs. If one could believe in some cosmic purpose, worked out through the folly and wickedness of men, it might be possible to wait patiently for the happy consummation. But if one believes that there is no purpose in the non-human world—at any rate in that part of it with which we are in contact—it is useless to look to anything but human effort to extricate us from the dangers of the time. Science and machinery have given men new powers over nature and over each other. Unfortunately, the more humane portion of mankind is also the less executive portion, and therefore the new powers have fallen into
