but all sides, taking the keenest pleasure in all the life of the world. So it is a point of honor with us not to be self-centered,—not to suppose that the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of sentiment and sensibility; we are no more inclined to eke out our sentimental sorrows than to cherish our bodily pains; and we recognize that there are other pleasures besides love-making. You must remember, also, that we are long-lived, and that therefore beauty both in man and woman is not so fleeting as it was in the days when we were burdened so heavily with self-inflicted diseases. So we shake off these griefs in a way which perhaps the sentimentalist of other times would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manlike. As on the one hand, therefore, we have ceased to be commercial in our love-matters, so also we have ceased to be artificially foolish. The folly which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, or the older man caught in a trap, we must put up with that, nor are we much ashamed of it; but to be conventionally sensitive or sentimental—my friend, I am old and perhaps disappointed, but at least I think that we have cast off some of the follies of the older world."
Parentage and the State
By H. G. Wells
(See pages 519, 675, 712, 830, 844, 853, 856, 863, 868)
Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to the world, carrying with it not only obligations but a claim, the strongest of claims, upon the whole community. It must be paid for like any other
