How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

marks the beginning of mental and social maturity, but a fourteen-year-old boy or girl in London or New York is the veriest infant. Social responsibility is hardly ever imputed to him. Although he is allowed to vote at the age of twenty-one, in all probability he is in no position to establish a family and assume his full social responsibilities until he is between the ages of thirty and forty. A not inconsiderable proportion of the population of this country never attains complete social maturity, and our civilization is marked by the irresponsible acts of men and women whose bodies bear the marks of maturity, but whose minds remain at adolescent or pre-adolescent levels. The permanence of the human family is an outgrowth of the weakness and dependence of the human child. If our children could be thrust out into the world, prepared to take their place in the social structure at the age of ten or eleven years, the family as we know it to-day would never exist. Valuable as the family is as a means of protecting the immature, it carries within itself the dread germs of anti-social disintegration. Physical incest is practically unknown among wild animals, because the young are abandoned to their fate as soon as they can take care of their immediate needs, and the chance of brother mating with sister, or parent mating with child, is reduced to a minimum by nature. Not so in the human family. Incest (which runs counter to nature’s scheme of cross-fertilization and the consequent levelling of individual differences to the advantage of the race) becomes a real problem in civilized communities. Legal bars against incest exist in every civilized community, while some form of taboo is aimed against incest in almost all savage and barbarian com¬ munities. But there are no laws, as yet, against the mental component of the over-emphasized family relation which may be called mental incest. This neurotic attitude is far more dangerous both to the individual and to the State, both because of its inestimably more frequent occurrence, and because of its insidious effect on those who come in