Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/282

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ANTICIPATIONS

They will have another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain for the sake of the pain is against the better nature of man, and it is unsafe and demoralising for any one to undertake this duty. To kill under the seemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing. The rulers of the future will grudge making good people into jailers, warders, punishment-dealers, nurses, and attendants on the bad. People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment even to-day, but the men of the New Republic will have the courage of their opinions.

And the type of men that I conceive emerging in the coming years will deal simply and logically not only with the business of death, but with birth. At present the sexual morality of the civilised world is the most illogical and incoherent system of wild permissions and insane prohibitions, foolish tolerance and ruthless cruelty that it is possible to imagine. Our current civilisation is a sexual lunatic. And it has lost its reason in this respect under the stresses of the new birth of things, largely through the difficulties that have stood in the way, and do still, in a diminishing degree, stand in the way of any sane discussion of the matter as a whole. To approach it is to approach excitement. So few people seem to be leading happy and healthy sexual lives that to mention the very word "sexual" is to set them stirring, to brighten the eye, lower the voice, and blanch or flush the cheek with a flavour of guilt. We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and hiding

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