tions of life
become offensive and noxious, with the result that at last the
association of uncleanliness with these natural conditions becomes so
overpowering that among civilized people (that is, people massed in the
labyrinths of slums we call cities), half their bodily life becomes a
guilty secret, unmentionable except to the doctor in emergencies; and
Hedda Gabler shoots herself because maternity is so unladylike. In
short, popular prudery is only a mere incident of popular squalor: the
subjects which it taboos remain the most interesting and earnest of
subjects in spite of it.

VII

PROGRESS AN ILLUSION

Unfortunately the earnest people get drawn off the track of evolution by
the illusion of progress. Any Socialist can convince us easily that the
difference between Man as he is and Man as he might become, without
further evolution, under millennial conditions of nutrition,
environment, and training, is enormous. He can shew that inequality and
iniquitous distribution of wealth and allotment of labor have arisen
through an unscientific economic system, and that Man, faulty as he is,
no more intended to establish any such ordered disorder than a moth
intends to be burnt when it flies into a candle flame. He can shew that
the difference between the grace and strength of the acrobat and the
bent back of the rheumatic field laborer is a difference produced by
conditions, not by nature. He can shew that many of the most detestable
human vices are not radical, but are mere reactions of our institutions
on our very virtues. The Anarchist, the Fabian, the Salvationist, the
Vegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics,
the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the political
program-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almost
all their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils.
To them the limit of progress is, at worst, the completion of all the
suggested reforms and the levelling up of all men to the point attained
already by the most highly nourished and cultivated in mind and body.

Here, then, as it seems to them, is an enormous field for the energy of
the reformer. Here are many noble goals attainable by many of those
paths up the Hill Difficulty along which great spirits love to aspire.
Unhappily, the hill will never be climbed by Man as we know him. It
need not be denied that if we all struggled bravely to the end of the
re