6; 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and in which children growing up, better educated than father or 

 mother, will know that they have to thank the state for schooling 

 and protection and are little indebted to their parents, who have 

 simply taken advantage of their tender years to confiscate the 

 proceeds of their industry. In these halcyon days there will be a 

 state creche, a state school and state medical institution, supple- 

 mented by state meals, and the child when well drilled in the 

 state gymnasium will pass from the state school into a state 

 workshop, and finally on to the state crematorium. The result 

 of all this will be that as marriage becomes legalized concubinage 

 the obligation of family duties will attenuate ; as children under- 

 stand that it is to the state they have been indebted for mainte- 

 nance the old feelings of gratitude and affection which bound 

 them to their parents will dwindle away; and as parents lose 

 their proprietary and administrative rights over children they 

 will more and more shift the responsibility for them on to the 

 state. The family with all its sacred traditions and precious 

 training will decline, and man like the cuckoo will be con- 

 stantly seeking to foist on others the maintenance of his off- 

 spring. Mr. Pearson's prognostications, however, are, I venture 

 to think, of an unnecessarily gloomy description. They are 

 founded on the assumption that society is destined to become 

 more and more secular ; they betray ignorance of human nature, 

 for surely the love of children for parents is not founded solely 

 on a sordid calculation of what they owe them ; and they involve 

 the error that the volume of feeling must always be the same and 

 that its expansion in one direction, so as to embrace the sphere of 

 state action, implies its contraction in another direction, so as to 

 exclude family ties and claims. But there is no reason to doubt 

 that reverence for the state may grow without supplanting rev- 

 erence for the family ; nay, there is reason to hope that parental 

 and filial affection will become stronger and more tenacious as 

 time goes on. The restrictions placed by the state, as the expo- 

 nent of enlightened opinion and sentiment, on the autocratic 

 powers which the head of the family at one time possessed the 

 very existence of which provoked antagonism and the arbitrary 

 exercise of which corrupted may be expected to soften and ce- 

 ment the family relationship and make it more complete and last- 

 ing than it has hitherto been. Then it is to be remembered that 

 the period of dependence of offspring on parents steadily increases 

 as evolution advances. The higher the animal the longer the 

 duration of this period of dependence. It is more protracted in 

 civilized than in savage races and now than it has been hereto- 

 fore. And this protraction of intimate intercourse and reciprocal 

 relations between the members of a family certainly means a 

 deepening of the sense of kinship. We may flatter ourselves 



