find in them not only a physical,
but a mental and moral improvement. It would be strange if it were not
so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working
out the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment has come
to its support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating
idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of
brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any
realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to
follow. To-day this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized
in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the
race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction of duty, the natural
impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex. The
result is, that not all the encouragements and incentives of every
sort which we have provided to develop industry, talent, genius,
excellence of whatever kind, are comparable in their effect on our
young men with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the
race and reserve themselves to reward the winners. Of all the whips,
and spurs, and baits, and prizes, there is none like the thought of
the radiant faces which the laggards will find averted.

"Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men who have failed to
acquit themselves creditably in the work of life. The woman must be a
courageous one, with a very evil sort of courage, too, whom pity for
one of these unfortunates should lead to defy the opinion of her
generation--for otherwise she is free--so far as to accept him for a
husband. I should add that, more exacting and difficult to resist than
any other element in that opinion, she would find the sentiment of her
own sex. Our women have risen to the full height of their
responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping
the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this
respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in
which they educate their daughters from childhood."

After going to my room that night, I sat up late to read a romance of
Berrian, handed me by Dr. Leete, the plot of which turned on a
situation suggested by his last words, concerning the modern view of
parental responsibility. A similar situation would almost certainly
have been treated by a nineteenth century romancist so as to excite
the morbid sympathy of the reader with the sentimental selfishness of
th