But why is it, one cannot help wondering, that the moment a man rises up suddenly in this modern world and bases or seeks to base an industrial or social reform frankly on courage for other people, on believing in the inherent and eternal power of men of changing their minds, of being put up in new kinds and new sizes of men, in other words, on conversion—­why is it that clergymen, atheists, ethical societies, politicians, socialists will all unite, will all flock together and descend upon him, shout and laugh him away, bully him with dead millionaires, bad corporations and humdrum business men, overawe him with mere history, argue him with statistics, and thunder him with sermons out of the world—­if he puts up a faint little chirrup of hope that men can be converted?

It is not that the synods, ethical societies, anarchists, the bishops and Bernard Shaw, have merely given up expecting individual men to be converted.  There would be a measure of plausibility in giving up on a few particular men’s being born again.  It is worse than that.  What seems to have happened to nearly all the people who have schemes of industrial reform is that they have really given up at one fell swoop a whole new generation’s being born again.  It is going to be just like this one, they tell us, the new generation—­the same old things the same old foolish ways of deceiving the world, that any child can see have not worked—­Bernard Shaw and the bishops whisper to us, are coming around and around again.  They must be planned for.  All these young men of wealth about us who read the papers and who are ashamed of their fathers are going to be just like their fathers.  The atheists, the socialists, and the single taxers, missionaries and evangelists have given up their last loophole of hope in the new business generation and they trust only to machines to save us, or to professors, or to paper-treatises on eugenics!

And yet, after all, if we were going to start an absolute, decisive, and practical scheme of eugenics to-morrow with whom would we begin, with which particular people would we begin?  We would have to go back, Bernard Shaw and the bishops and all of us, to the New Testament—­to the old idea of being born again.

I have watched now these many years the professors, caught in their culture-machines going round and round, and the priests caught in their religion-machines going round and round, and the business men caught in their economic machine, and I have heard them all saying over and over in a kind of terrible sing-song day and night, the silly, lazy words of a glorious old roue four thousand years ago, “The thing that hath been is the thing which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done and there is no new thing under the sun.”

There are some of us who do not believe this.  We defy the culture-machines.  We believe that even professors can be converted, can be educated.

We defy the bishops.  We believe that business men can be converted.