“We’ll have to consider that. Please listen; this is growing interesting.”
“My point, Mrs. Trenton,” Professor Grayling was saying, “is just this: Your reform programme only touches the top of the social structure without regard to the foundation and the intermediate framework. In your ‘Clues to a New Social Order’ you consider how things might be—a happy state of things if the transition could be effected suddenly. Granting that what you would accomplish is desirable or essential to the general happiness of mankind, we can’t just pick out the few things we are particularly interested in and set them up alone. They’d be sure to topple over.”
“Oh, that!” Mrs. Trenton replied; and then as though aware that something more was expected of her she went on: “But a lot of changes have come in—in what you scientific economists would call the less important things. Just now I’m laying stress on an equal wage for men and women for the same labor. That I think more important than such things as more liberal divorce laws, though I favor both. As to divorce”—she gave her characteristic shrug,—“we all know that more liberal laws came as the result of changing conditions—the new attitude toward marriage and all that. We’re in the midst of a tremendous social evolution.”
“May I come in right here for a moment, Mrs. Trenton?” asked Dr. Ridgely. “You plead in your book for a change of existing laws to make marriage dissoluble at the will or whim of the contracting parties; children to be turned over to the State—a direct blow at the family. Do you really think that desirable?” he ended smilingly.
“Dear me! That idea didn’t originate with me,” she replied. “I merely went into it a little more concretely perhaps.”
Again, her curious vacant stare, followed in an instant by a gesture, the slightest lifting and closing of one of her graceful hands as though her thoughts, having ranged infinity, had brought back something it was not necessary in her immediate surroundings to disclose.
“But,” the minister insisted, “would such a solution be wise? Do you, honestly, think it desirable?”
“It’s coming; it’s inevitable!” she answered quickly.
“How many women can you imagine driving up to a big barracks and checking their babies? How strong is the maternal instinct?” asked Judge Sanders.
“Most mothers don’t know how to care for their children,” said Mrs. Trenton, bending forward to glance at the speaker. Sanders was a big man with a great shock of iron-gray hair. He was regarding Mrs. Trenton with the bland smile that witnesses always found disconcerting.