or little boys who played truant; there
was no reformatory for reformers. I need not pause to explain that
crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

Finally one thing may be added which is at least clear. Whether or no
the organisation of industry will issue positively in a eugenical
reconstruction of the family, it has already issued negatively, as in
the negations already noted, in a partial destruction of it. It took
the form of a propaganda of popular divorce, calculated at least to
accustom the masses to a new notion of the shifting and re-grouping of
families. I do not discuss the question of divorce here, as I have
done elsewhere, in its intrinsic character; I merely note it as one of
these negative reforms which have been substituted for positive
economic equality. It was preached with a weird hilarity, as if the
suicide of love were something not only humane but happy. But it need
not be explained, and certainly it need not be denied, that the
harassed poor of a diseased industrialism were indeed maintaining
marriage under every disadvantage, and often found individual relief
in divorce. Industrialism does produce many unhappy marriages, for the
same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms
were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness.
Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided.
Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of
sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with
the modern abuses. When the tares are found in the wheat, the greatest
promptitude and practicality is always shown in burning the wheat and
gathering the tares into the barn. And since the serpent coiled about
the chalice had dropped his poison in the wine of Cana, analysts were
instantly active in the effort to preserve the poison and to pour away
the wine.

CHAPTER VIII

THE END OF THE HOUSEHOLD GODS

The only place where it is possible to find an echo of the mind of the
English masses is either in conversation or in comic songs. The latter
are obviously the more dubious; but they are the only things recorded
and quotable that come anywhere near it. We talk about the popular
Press; but in truth there is no popular Press. It may be a good thing;
but, anyhow, most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper
leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the
Press is inter