“The fact is, the absolute contentment or happiness that your poets dream for you, and your priests sell to you in their heavens and nirvanas, is absolute satisfaction with whatever is. It can only come to an instinct in perfect harmony with its environment. People can never be perfectly happy except in a finished unchangeable state of existence. They may approach it under conditions in which change is very slow and slight.”
“Is our race likely to attain it or anything like it on earth?”
“Things on earth to-day look far more unsettled than ever before, and yet they are getting into a shape that promises peace and permanence in the not very distant future. When the earth gets as full of people as it will hold and they learn how to live by moderate exertion and above the fear of failure and want, the millennium will have come to the extent that it can come.”
“Well from what you said a while ago, I suppose the world must already be as full of people as it ought to be, and if everything is in equilibrium, the millennium ought to have already dawned. But you have not told me whether this equilibrium has been made secure and stable. For evidently if means have not been found to keep the population uniform and steady at its maximum limit of comfort, even a perfect equilibrium would soon be disturbed by its increase and the millennium set back again.
“You told me the stirpiculturists in the 20th century proposed to accomplish the two objects of restricting the race and at the same time improving it, by select limitation. How did the plan succeed?”
“It did not succeed at all,” he replied. “The population increased more rapidly than before. A state of society something like a corrupt and clandestine polygamy supervened. The tone of society instead of being elevated was distinctively lowered. Thus both of the objects they so hopefully set out to accomplish, disastrously failed. When it was definitely given up by the progressive party that they were defeated and obliged to confess they were on the wrong track there was a fearful revulsion and upheaval of society, as there always is when opinion is forced to fly from one extreme to another. Many persons felt they had been wronged—treated as criminals when they were only unfortunates.