Principles of western civilisation

vil THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 223

the future; but a change, nevertheless, so fundamental that it is already evident that there must proceed from it a sequence of phenomena entirely different from any before witnessed in the development of society.

In this change it is always the character of the developing antithesis before mentioned which must be kept in view. Almost the first indication through which we catch sight of what is taking place beneath the surface of society, and of the transforming evolutionary significance which is latent in the concepts of the new movement, is that of the attitude of responsibility towards human life.

We have seen in a previous chapter how the life of the individual was regarded in the Greek and Roman worlds as having no relation to any ends or principles which transcended the meaning of the present, as expressed within the limits of the existing political consciousness. The points at which the private life of the individual in the days of the Roman empire continued to come into direct and immediate contact with this principle, of which the right of the State to the life of the individual, and the power of the paterfamilias over the lives and persons of the family was the outward expression, were innumerable. The custom, however, in which the right of the parent to dispose of his children, even to death, survived in all its primitive strength down into the first centuries of the era in which we are living, was that of the exposure of infants.

From early times the abandonment, and even the actual putting to death, of children which were the result of legal marriage, but which were considered either surplus or useless, was a general custom of the poor and rich alike amongst the