136 CREATIVE INVOLUTION 



has been the social unit on which all authority, all order, 

 and all obedience have reposed. Therefore the family 

 has been the cement of society and the chief element in 

 cohesion. To preserve the family and thus to make so- 

 ciety stable, the woman has always sacrificed herself 

 for it, as the man has sacrificed himself for her upon the 

 field of battle. The obligations and the sacrifices have 

 been correlative. But I beheld our modern women 

 shrilly repudiating such a standard of duty and such a 

 theory of self-sacrifice. On the contrary, they denied 

 that they, as individuals, owed society any duty as 

 mothers or as wives, and maintained that their first duty 

 was to themselves. If they found the bonds of the 

 family irksome, they might renounce them and wander 

 whither they would through the world in order to obtain 

 a fuller life for themselves. . . . 



" If it be true, as I do apprehend, that our ' demo- 

 cratic ideal ' is only a phrase to express our renunciation 

 as a nation of all standards of duty, and the substitution 

 therefor of a reference to private judgment; if we men 

 are to leave to ourselves as individuals the decision as 

 to how and when our country may exact from us our lives ; 

 if each woman may dissolve the family bond at pleasure ; 

 if, in fine, we are to have no standard of duty, of obedi- 

 ence, or, in substance, of right and wrong, save selfish 

 caprice; if we are to resolve our society from a firmly 

 cohesive mass, unified by a common standard of duty 

 and self-sacrifice, into a swarm of atoms selfishly fight- 

 ing each other for money, as beggars scramble for coin, 

 then I much fear that the hour cannot be far distant, 

 when some superior because more cohesive and intelli- 

 gent organism, such as nature has decreed shall always 

 lie in wait for its victim, shall spring upon us and rend 

 us as the strong have always rent those wretched be- 



