parents who are sacrificed to their offspring. In our superior human
civilisation, in which quantity ever tends to give place to quality, the
higher value of the individual involves an effort to avoid sacrifice which
sometimes proves worse than abortive. An avian philosopher would be
unlikely to feel called upon to denounce nests as the dark places of the
earth, and in laying down our human moral laws we have always to be aware
of forgetting the fundamental biological relationship of parent and child
to which all such moral laws must conform. To some would-be parents that
necessity may seem hard. In such a case it is well for them to remember
that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it
is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for
lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them--ignorant
parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents--and those
who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as
few as they will--and perhaps at the present time the fewer the
better--must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains
as well as its joys.

In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us--the duties
in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of
others or in both--are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties
to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle
of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and
to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art
and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. We
have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. To that extent
George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right. But the renunciation
of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than
is the absolute failure to renounce. In a certain sense the duty towards
the self comes before all others, because it is the condition on which