If the moral futurist criticizes the cowardice of the moral conservative who takes sides with powers that be then the moral conservative can return the charge; he can say that the moral futurist is a coward since he takes sides with the powers that will be, with the rulers of to-morrow. And he had seen how shamelessly a concept like freedom could be twisted. I hful to my humanitarian standards, he might have said, I shall teach them to my pupils; perhaps they will survive this perhaps some day they will be victorious. The fundamental decision cannot be derived from any knowledge the future. All that is, at least, conceivable. It is likewise at least conceivable (I do not assert more, at present) that a man who to-day foresees with certainty that we heading for a period of slavery, that we are going to return to the cage of the arrested society, or even that we are about to return to the beasts, nevertheless decide not to adopt the moral standards of this impending period but to contribute as well as he can to the survival of his humanitarian ideals, hoping perhaps for a resurrection of his morality in some dim future. Now let us first examine the claim of historicist moral theory that the fundamental decision in favour of, or against, one of the moral systems in question is itself not a moral decision; that it not based any moral consideration or sentiment, but on a scientific historical prediction. This is why he did not preach freedom in words - why he preached it in action unsafe . But the fact that such a decision is excluded neither by foreknowledge nor by any sociological or psychological law shows that the first claim of historicist moral theo d, the wish to free ry is untenable.