If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters,
let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am
an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I
call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking
for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express
in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the
long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is
reaching a definite issue.
These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the
_organic_ and the _internecine_. The internecine conception of society
forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against
class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground
that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false.
Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it
is the Great Lie.
And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from
which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here
contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations;
we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that
discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very
long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of
nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the
patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago.
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