458 THE MORALITY OF THE FUTURE 



might so easily have been broken are now harder than 

 adamant, are now stronger than steel: his life is passed 

 between desire and remorse : when the desire is 

 quenched he is tortured by his conscience : be soothes 

 it with a promise ; and then the desire comes again. 

 He sinks lower and lower until indulgence gives 

 him no pleasure : and yet abstinence cannot be endured. 

 To stimulate his jaded senses he enters strange and 

 tortuous paths which lead him to that awful border- 

 land, where all is darkness, all is horror, where vice 

 lies close to crime. Yet there was a time when 

 that man was as guileless as a girl : be began by learn- 

 ing vice from the example of his companions, just as 

 he learnt to smoke. Had his education been more 

 severe : had the earliest inclinations been checked 

 by the fear of ruin and disgrace, he would not have 

 acquired the most dangerous of all habits. That men 

 should be subjected to the same discipline as women is 

 therefore to be wished for : and although the day is far 

 distant, there can be no doubt that it will come : and 

 the future historian of morals will record with surprise 

 that in the nineteenth century society countenanced 

 vices in men, which it punished in women with banish- 

 ment for life. Since men are in a transitional condi- 

 tion ; since Nature ordains that the existence of the 

 race can only be preserved by means of gross appetites 

 inherited from our ancestors, the animals, it is obvious 

 that men should refine them so far as they are able. 

 Thus the brute business of eating and drinking is made 

 in civilized life the opportunity of social intercourse ; 

 the family, divided by the duties of the day, then 

 assemble and converse : men of talent are drawn 

 together and interchange ideas. Many a poem, many 

 an invention, many a great enterprise, has been born 



