oleness. And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the great
spontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no lovely great flux of vital
sympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence.
There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there is
substitute for everything--life-substitute--just as we have
butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and
leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute.
We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity,
and poisonous ideals.

The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into life by an effort of will,
and shoved up towards manhood by every appliance that can be applied
to it, especially the appliance of the maternal will, it is really too
pathetic to contemplate. The only thing that prevents us wringing our
hands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and beget
other similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes and
hospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. The
problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which
is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle.

There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breaking
the circle. And since the mother-child relationship is to-day the
viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results of
the poison-gas competition presumably.

Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and despicable you are! And how you
deserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your own
stink.

It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, born
out of the mental-conscious love-will, born to be another unit of
self-conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little entity with a
devil's own will of its own, benevolent, of course, and a Satan's own
seraphic self-consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat.

Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will,
we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the
inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed to
have invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in
Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, and
London is a Pompeii in five minutes! Or was the American only
bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it in
the newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes the
gods look