s this only at infinite peril. To a great number
of these people, in the second or third generation, this freedom will
mean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures. We have
on record, in the personal history of the Roman emperors, how freedom
and uncontrolled power took one representative group of men, men not
entirely of one blood nor of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrary
caprice of adoption and political revolution. We have in the history of
the Russian empresses a glimpse of similar feminine possibilities. We
are moving towards a time when, through this confusion of moral
standards I have foretold, the pressure of public opinion in these
matters must be greatly relaxed, when religion will no longer speak with
a unanimous voice, and when freedom of escape from disapproving
neighbours will be greatly facilitated. In the past, when depravity had
a centre about a court, the contagion of its example was limited to the
court region, but every idle rich man of this great, various, and widely
diffused class, will play to a certain extent the moral _role_ of a
court. In these days of universal reading and vivid journalism, every
novel infraction of the code will be known of, thought about, and more
or less thoroughly discussed by an enormous and increasing proportion of
the common people. In the past it has been possible for the churches to
maintain an attitude of respectful regret towards the lapses of the
great, and even to co-operate in these lapses with a sympathetic
privacy, while maintaining a wholesome rigour towards vulgar vice. But
in the coming time there will be no Great, but many rich, the middling
sort of people will probably be better educated as a whole than the
rich, and the days of their differential treatment are at an end.

It is foolish, in view of all these things, not to anticipate and
prepare for a state of things when not only will moral standards be
shifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically sound _menages_ of
very variable status, but also when vice and depravity, in every form
that is not absolutely penal, will be practised in every grade of
magnificence and condoned. This means that not only will status cease to
be simple and become complex and varied, but that outside the system of
_menages_ now recognized, and under the disguise of which all other
_menages_ shelter, there will be a vast drifting and unstable population
grouped in almost every conceivable form of