Without Prejudice

first hearing, this sounds taking, but its plausibility diminishes under investigation. Health is the normal state of an organism, the perfect working of its parts,-it is not something superadded, as disease is. You might as well expect one watch to catch the right time from another. The philanthropist would have been more within the bounds of the reasonable if he had demanded that disease should be more egotistic and less epidemic. Every organism ought to consume its own smoke, and not communicate its misfortunes to its neighbours. And this it does satisfactorily enough in organic disease; it is only when those impish germs, microbes and bacilli, mix themselves up with the matter that we get pathological socialism. I confess that the whole germ business seems to me an illogical element in the scheme of destruction, though 't is of a piece with the structure of things. And yet there is a sense in which health is catching. There is a contagion of confidence as well as of panic, and the surest way to escape epidemics is to disbelieve them. Radiant people radiate health. The mind is a big factor in things hygienic.'tisa poor medicine that takes no account of the soul. We are not earthen receptacles for drugs, but breathing clay vivified by thoughts and passions. And in the universe of morals, at any rate, health is catching just as much as disease. We are ennobled by noble souls, and uplifted by righteousness. We pattern ourselves unconsciously upon our friends. Character is contagious, and emotion epidemic, and good-humour has its germs; copy-book maxims are null and void: packets of propositions leave us cold. Morality can only be taught by object-lessons; they err egregiously who would teach it by the card. A fine character in a play or a novel outweighs a sermon; and in real life the preacher pales before the practiser. It is a great day when a man discovers for himself that honesty is the best policy. Morality is a matter of feeling and will, not of intellect. Handbooks of ethics may edify the intellect, and 'Cicero de Officiis' be the favourite reading of rogues. I knew a university student who at his examination cribbed Kant's panegyric of the moral law from a concealed text-book.

The legend of Death's marriage recalls to me that of John L. Sullivan's. It is said that the famous bruiser was in like grievous plight. His wife beat him, and he had to sue for a divorce on the ground of cruelty! There is something deliciously pathetic about the insignificance of a great man to his wife-his valet feels small at least on pay-day. 'The Schoolmaster Abroad' is a rampant divinity with a ferocious ferule; at home he is a meek person in slippers. The policeman who stands majestically at the cross-roads, waving the white glove of authority, nods in the chimney- corner without a helmet. Bishop Proudie was not much of a hero to Mrs. Proudie, and even a beadle is, I fear, but moderately imposing in the domestic sanctum. That a prophet is not without honour save in his own country, we know; but even if he travel abroad, he must leave his wife behind him,-else will he never continuously contemplate his own greatness. This is why so many great men remain bachelors. It perhaps also explains why the others are so unhappy in their marriages. Perhaps there ought to be a training-school for the supply of great men's wives.

XXII. THE CHOICE OF PARENTS

'Yes,' said Marindin quietly, 'they may say they write for Posterity, but what living author besides myself does write for Posterity?'

This sounded so unlike Marindin's modesty that I wondered if the port and the paradoxes of our Christmas dinner had got into his head at last. The veteran man of letters had talked brilliantly more suo of many things, most of all perhaps of his dead friend, Charles Dickens. Who seemed more surely to have been writing Christmas stories for Posterity? we had asked ourselves musingly, as we discussed the change of temper since the days when Dickens or Father Christmas might have stood for the Time-Spirit. Many good things had Marindin said of Ibsen and Nietzsche and the modern apostles of self-development who sneered at the Gospel of self-sacrifice, and at all the amiable virtues our infancy had drawn from 'The Fairchild Family' with its engaging references to Jeremiah xvii. 9. But now he was breaking out in a new way, and I missed the reassuring twinkle in his eye.

'I think I may without arrogance claim to be the one author who really has considerable influence with Posterity,' he went on, drawing serenely at his cigar and adjusting his right leg more comfortably across the arm of his easy-chair. 'Is there any one else whom Posterity listens to?'

I shifted uneasily in my own arm-chair. 'What do you mean?' I inquired baldly.

'Don't you know I write for the unborn?' he counter-queried.

'But they don't read you-yet,' I said, trying to smile.

'My dear fellow! Why, I'm the best-read man in Ante-land, The unborn swear by me! My publishers, Fore and Futurus, are simply rolling in promissory notes.'

'You've become a Theosophist!' I cried in alarm, for that familiar twinkle in his eye had been replaced by a strange exaltation.

'And what if I have?'

'Theosophy!' I cried scornfully-'Theology for Atheists! The main contemporary form of the Higher Foolishness.'

'The Higher Foolishness!' echoed Marindin indignantly.

'Yes, the Foolishness of the fool with brains. The brainless fool fulfils himself in low ways-in alcoholic saturnalia, in salvation carnivals, in freethought hysterics, in political bombs. The Higher Foolishness expresses itself in aberrations of poetry and art, in table-rapping and theosophy, in vegetarianism, and in mystic calculations about the Beast.'

'It is you who are the fool,' he replied shortly. 'Theosophy is true-that is, my form of it. Birth is but the name for the entry upon this particular form of existence.

'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.

'The unborn pre-exist, even as the dead persist; and instead of addressing Posterity posthumously and circuitously, I have anticipated its verdict. I have written for the unborn, direct. I have been the apostle of the New Ethics among the pre-natal populations, the prophet of individualism among the unborn.'

'What! You have propagated the teaching that free choice must be the battle-cry of the future, that the only genuine morality is that which is the spontaneous outcome of an emancipated individuality!'

'Precisely.'

'But what has free choice to do with the unborn?'

'What has it to do? Great heavens! Everything. The battle-cry of the future will be Free Birth.'

'Free Birth!' I echoed.

'Yes-this is what I have been preaching to the unborn-the choice of their parents before consenting to be born! Compulsory birth must be swept away. What! would you sweep away all checks upon the individuality of the individual-once he is born would you tear asunder all the swaddling-bands of our baby civilisation; would you replace the rules of the nursery by the orderly anarchy of manhood and womanhood, and yet retain such an incoherent anachronism as compulsory birth-a disability which often cripples a man upon the very threshold of his career? Without this initial reform the individualism of your Ibsens and Auberon Herberts becomes a mere simulacrum, a hollow mockery. If you are to develop your individuality, it must be your own individuality that you develop, not an individuality thrust upon you by a couple of outsiders.'

'And you have preached this with success?'

'With unheard-of success.'

'Unheard-of, indeed!' I muttered sarcastically.

'In your plane of existence!' he retorted. 'In Anteland the movement has spread widely; scarcely a soul but has become convinced of the evils of compulsion in this most personal matter, and of the necessity of having a voice in its own incarnation. And it is I, moi qui vous parle, who have sown the seeds of the revolt against our present social arrangements. Too long had parents presumed upon the ignorance and helplessness of the unborn and upon their failure to combine. But now the great wave of emancipation which is lifting us all off our feet has reached the coming race. And soon the old ideal will be nothing but a strangled snake by the cradle of Hercules.'

'Why, I never heard of such a thing in all my born days!' I cried helplessly.

'Of course not; you are more ignorant than the babe unborn. You trouble yourself about the next world, but as to what may be going on in the last world, that never enters your head. But for the tyranny of outward social forms you and I might have deferred our birth till a serener century. Henceforth the dreamer of dreams will have only himself to blame if he is born out of his due time and called upon to set the crooked straight. Job himself would have escaped his misfortunes if he had only had the patience to wait. In future any one who is born in a hurry will