THE EXTINCTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE

I

How now, in detail, does the Feminist creed lend itself to the biological developments and indications of Nature described in the last chapter?

Unfortunately, as already intimated, it ignores, violently combats at every turn, and only too frequently wholly frustrates them.

Feminist leaders have shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to biological and to sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the intrinsic and eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood—and more particularly Motherhood—they have made, all along the line, not for the true emancipation of woman but for her commercialisation, merely.

The economic viewpoint has obsessed them wholly. Not to free woman from disabilities under which her womanhood, her wifehood, and her motherhood were suffering, but to convert her powers into industrial and marketable commodities has been the aim. That higher ideals are bound up with economics, is true. The rights of honest self-support and adequate wage, leading to kindlier, healthier and happier life-conditions, are, by improving constitution and character, important assets on the side of Evolution. But by far the most urgent and important consideration in economics, as these affect women, is the fundamental biological principle that, because their greatest of all values lie in their evolutionary and racial endowments, rather than in their concrete and commercial efficiencies, the sex requires and is entitled to such more lenient and privileged social and industrial adjustments as admit of due quota of its vital resources, physical and mental, remaining conserved in the potential. In place of these being differentiated and expended to the degree natural to man, and exacted of him by his prescribed rÔle in progress.

In direct and violent opposition to Nature, the Feminist system does everything possible, however, to frustrate that normal phase of arrest along lines of concrete development whereon the higher evolution of woman—and in woman, of the Race—depends. Just at the age when Nature locks the door upon her constitutional resources, for the purpose of evolving these to higher organisation, the schools and industries do a strenuous best to keep the door forcibly open, and to wrest the resources from the storehouse of potential. With a view to fitting woman to compete with the male, in whom such arrest of individuation, in the racial interests, is occurring to vastly less degree.

In all ways, the natural languors and disabilities of the girl's adolescent phase are vigorously combated. The unfortunate young developing creature is exhorted, spurred—compelled by rigid rule, indeed (whatsoever her physiological disabilities), to take her part in strenuous exertions; hard drill, cricket, hockey, football; with the aim of developing masculine muscles where feminine muscles should be. At the same time, her brain is forced, crammed and exploited by perpetual mental tasks; by competitive examinations, or by some or another strain of specialism, intellectual or industrial. The result is that she is forcibly precluded from evolving to those higher, subtler modes of body and of mind, which are the essence, the charm and the inspiration of the sex; and the model of the Race to be.

Our school-girls and work-girls, in whose already impoverished, or degenerate, bodies this battle for their resources between Nature and Culture (or Industrialism) is waged—the one to make them normal, the other to make them abnormal—are all more or less in states of disease; are chlorotic, anÆmic, neurotic, dyspeptic, hysterical; or suffer from ailments special to their sex. While some are sturdy and florid and buxom (prematurely middle-aged), more are neurasthenic and attenuated, ill-nourished, spectacled, breastless, hipless, pale or pimply; are restless, emotionless, joyless, cynical, discontented. In but few are found the thrill and joy, the pulse and spring and natural enthusiasms of healthy, happy young creatures in the dawn and grace of maidenhood. Such as are charming and pretty possess these natural woman-characteristics only too often in fragile and weed-like form. The constitutional degeneracy of some shows in precocious sex-development—all precocity being degeneracy, development too rapid and exhaustive, and entailing therefore flimsy and unstable tissue-cells, faulty functioning and premature decline.

A proportion, one is thankful to say, are normal and healthful and charming, endowed with the attributes and graces, personal and mental, for which Nature is shaping in the sex. Others are, biologically speaking, mere lamentable "spoiled copies"; amazons of the hockey, football, tennis or hunting-fields, only just distinguishable in general characteristics from the male, and lacking more or less wholly in womanly psychology and aptitude, and in all the fairer and nobler attributes of their sex. Still others, although handsome and finely female of physique, are "splendidly null" in respect of the emotions, and of the other subtler and psychical developments of natural womanhood.

The Greeks, with their intuitive apprehension, pourtrayed both Athene, goddess of Intellect, and Artemis, goddess of Sports, as sexless, passionless, unwedded and childless; scorners of men, devoid of all womanly impulse and sentiment. (Strangely enough, as though anticipating the argument of this book, Athene is described as having sprung, in full life, from her father's brain. While Scripture tells of Eve derived from Adam's side.)

In The New System of GynÆcology, the latest and most authoritative treatise by eminent specialists in women's diseases, the following passage occurs, under heading, "Derangement of the Sex-Characteristics":

"It is our belief that the more truly feminine a woman is, psychically and physically, in instinct and in performance, so much the more complete and normal will be the functions of her mind and body. We have already alluded to inverted instincts. And in the perversion of functions and characteristics (physical phenomena) we may observe all grades from almost complete masculinity in appearance, with the disappearance of the feminine functions, to the lesser degrees of disordered function and characteristics."

II

Nature is so complex, yet so subtly consistent in her workings, that the neuter-state shows in the faces of many of our women as the typical look of the mule—cross between horse and ass, a creature incapable of reproduction. In the eyes of young women of strenuous pursuits—academic, industrial, or athletic, this characteristic sterile glint, part boldness, part antagonism, is common.

The normal condition of woman is attended by the normal expression of woman. The womanly biology entails the womanly psychology. And modesty is one of the natural female secondary Sex-characteristics, attendant upon healthy structural development and function. The hard, bold glance—the "mule"-look—of some masculine girls and women by no means necessarily implies conscious immodesty. It is mainly biological and subconscious; sign of an attribute missing, as result of deterioration of the function in which the attribute is normally rooted.

With reduced values of that Reproductive function it is modesty's province to defend, the attribute of modesty declines.

The girls and women of old Sparta, as ignorant of biology as women are to-day, made a cult of athletics—good and zealous, but mistaken patriots!—for the express purpose of mothering a fine, athletic race. These high and praiseworthy aims failed signally. For Sparta, with all her zeal of racial improvement (so drastic in its methods that she killed her weakly girl-infants) fell upon decline and degeneracy. Noble civilisation that she had been, she died in decadent corruption.

And showing the relation between athletic pursuits and extinction of womanly qualities, the Spartan cult of Maleness led to such decay of modesty that it became the custom for women to run with the men in The Games, naked as they. A custom that sprang less from actual immodesty than from lapse of that normal Sex-specialisation, whence arises the normal sex-consciousness which engenders wholesome reserve between the sexes. Modern developments of a similar extinction of womanly modesty are seen in the conduct of latter-day girls and women in public parks and elsewhere; in the unseemly familiarities of mixed bathing; in the decadent, unduly-familiar or frankly indecent dances, and the frankly indecent modes of dress just now in vogue. As too in that so-called "candour" which permits women of culture to talk openly of the most intimate physiological functions, and, without sense of shame, to discuss across the dinner-table prurient scandals and other unsavoury topics.

The mystery of the creative powers of Life occulted in her has ever invested woman, for man, with glamour and reverence, enhancing a thousandfold her charm and appeal to his chivalry and tenderness. In stripping herself of womanly reserve and dignity, alike in demeanour and dress, she shatters her mystery for him and forfeits her supremest claim upon his manhood; while robbing him of his fairest illusions and most inspiring incentives.

III

In cases of sex-transformation in the lower creatures, the lapse to a masculine type is found to be accompanied by atrophy of reproductive glands. As recorded in a previous chapter, investigations by RÖrig show that when the ovaries of female deer atrophy from any cause, male antlers develop.

Mannish sex-characteristics in women are as abnormal and as unnatural, and arise from a similar cause as do male antlers in female deer.

With the wane of parental power, normal to middle-age, there occurs a like—but in such case a natural—atrophy of glands. And this it is that causes some women to acquire masculine traits at this epoch.

Degrees, greater or less, of such a decline (natural to middle-aged women) are being artificially, and prematurely, induced in our girls and young women. Some of them become actually sterilised, and are wholly incapable of reproduction. The greater number are only partially sterilised. They are capable still of being mothers. But the function, in place of being the crown and the fulfilment of their natures, is a disability; is more or less of a morbid process, indeed. And their offspring are more or less deteriorate. Not a few, after marriage—called upon to fulfil functions the resources whereof have been sapped by other and abnormal activities—become invalids; a number require surgical treatment.

Non-development, similar atrophy, or other deterioration of the mammary glands precludes the vast majority of our young mothers from nourishing their babes—a deplorable injury to these as well as to the mothers themselves; physical and psychical function being closely and subtly allied.

Women who fence or play hockey and other rough games during girlhood, become, owing to such degenerative atrophy, incapacitated for lactation.

The following is an interesting example of the manner in which cruder and lower-grade power may be increased at the cost of higher faculties. A patient told me that, having been naturally a poor walker—two miles having been her limit—she had determined to train herself out of this which she regarded as an infirmity. Accordingly, by persistent practice, she succeeded in raising her walking-power to ten miles daily. She mentioned incidentally—seeing no relation of cause and effect—that, for several years (the years during which her walking-powers had been increasing) she had become progressively deaf.

That she had been, in point of fact, sapping the potential of the complex, invaluable faculty of hearing, in order to equip her leg-muscles, was confirmed for me a few weeks later, when I read of a number of cyclists, who, after one of those deplorable pacing-exhibitions common to-day, came in, one and all, stone deaf: a consequence of nervous strain. The deafness in these cases passed off with rest. But it is easy to understand that from such temporary functional depletions frequently recurring, permanent structural deterioration must result inevitably. Thus it is that over-use, in sports and games, of the muscles of shoulder and chest, occasions atrophy of mammary glands.

By no other way than by artificially inducing in them a premature (partial) climacteric, by perverting their young organisations to the quasi-masculine type of the middle-aged woman, and thereby releasing, for available output, power which should have remained conserved for many years in organisation, can women be fitted for masculine pursuits. And such sterilisation, where it is not producing actually diseased and degenerate offspring, is producing a pitiful race of pallid and enfeebled babes and children; dyspeptic and spectacled, adenoid-afflicted, unchildlike and generally deteriorate.

That other factors contribute to the wave of Racial decline now menacing our modern civilisations, great and small, is true. Yet mothers of fine vital potential are able to counteract and to minimise the effects of constitutional disease in the other parent to degrees but little realised. Because such mothers are so lamentably rare.

IV

It is the natural release of vital forces, consequent upon the normal wane of mother-power at middle-age, that has been mainly responsible for the errors of the Woman's Movement.

In all its aims and methods it has been essentially a Middle-aged Woman's movement. There are no young ideals in it; no concessions to youth, to love, to graciousness or sentiment; none to wifehood or to motherhood. It has been, for the most part, a grim, dour striving after neuter standards, neuter models, neuter efficiencies, neuter lives and neuter recompenses.

Identity of brain and muscle, of aims and claims, of games and avocations; equal rights and equal work and equal pay have been the watchwords of its propaganda. "Fair play and no privileges!" its promoters rigorously demand for these poor weedy girl-neurotics who, beyond all else, require industrial concessions and the human clemency of adequate rest and leisure, to allow of normal and healthful development of their growing brains and bodies.

Pioneered by strenuous, middle-aged women—with the best intentions, be it said—Feminists have adopted the fatal policy of sternly impressing the model of their own quasi-masculine middle-age as the standard of youthful development. Without, for a moment, suspecting that such wresting of male energies and efficiencies from its young women-victims has inevitably entailed upon them degrees of that climacteric of womanhood which is the herald of decline. On the contrary, this middle-aged, quasi-masculine state, because of its release of power for sterner purposes, has been hailed as a triumph of Emancipation and of higher education; proof positive that woman is not man—only because she has lacked opportunity to become so.

In point of fact, these unfortunate young creatures have been, and are being all the while ever further despoiled of their youth, of their sex, and their fair heritage of life and happiness, of function and of faculty. And the Race has been robbed of priceless living wealth in human health and capability.

The breasts of these despoiled have shrunk, in place of blossoming. There are no founts of altruistic life in them. Never will they be capable of nurturing babes, or of contributing their mysterious due to psychical attribute. The pelvis remains narrow and puerile. Never can it serve as hostel for a babe of normal, healthful type.

In the vast majority of modern girls and women, the reproductive organs are structurally immature or functionally defective.

Dr. Gaillard Thomas, an eminent American gynÆcologist, estimated, some years since, that only about 4 per cent. of American women proper were physiologically fitted to become wives and mothers.

The United States have been and are all the while deriving fresh influx of vigour and vitality in stock, from the continuous immigration of simpler and more vitalised peoples. But American women proper have never recovered from the strain and hardships of adaptation to a new environment, which settlers in alien and undeveloped countries necessarily encounter; the deteriorative influences whereof are shown in constitutional impoverishment of the parent-stock. This is true, as well, of our Colonial kin. Not only the strain of acclimatisation, but too the hard and rough life-conditions women have to cope with in undeveloped lands are responsible for the constitutionally-debilitated, or, on the other hand, for the rawer and less highly-organised racial types found in new settlements.

In the United States, moreover, the standards of culture and of training are pre-eminently artificial. Democratic sentiment and material prosperity induce persons of working-class biological organisation to over-tax their children's brains and constitutions by forcing these to the educational standards and culture of stock that has evolved, by generations of higher nurture, to higher evolutionary grades. The "newly-rich," eager for their families to profit (as they regard it) by opportunities denied themselves, invariably commit this radical error of over-estimating academic education and social accomplishment. They fail to realise that one can no more attain culture than one can acquire breeding in a single generation. It takes three generations of culture—of comparative ease and freedom from the strain of industrial labour and living—to evolve the crude muscular arm of a working woman into the shapely, refined arm of a gentlewoman. And so it must be with brains. In nineteen cases out of twenty, a 'Varsity education serves as irreparable injury rather than as benefit to a working-class youth, depleting health or warping character as it inevitably does.

The strain of living above the evolutionary level is exhaustive and harmful, physically and mentally, both to individuals and to stock. The prudence of apportioning education to the grade of evolutionary development is strikingly shown in the cases of negroes, who, when over-taxed by the education normal to white races, not seldom become blind or consumptive. And always the morale deteriorates. The forcing upon our own labouring-classes of an education above that suited to their natural powers has contributed largely to the constitutional deterioration and the neurasthenia common among them to-day.

One of the factors of modern Labour-unrest, indeed, is the physical unfitness of debilitated and neurotic working-men to cope capably and cheerfully with the tasks of earlier and sturdier generations.

The urgent need of all our over-civilised races is not more education but more native faculty.

Every form of disease and degeneracy, physical and mental, is rampant. A well-known authority on brain-diseases warns us that if mental defectiveness continues to increase at its present rapid pace, soon we shall be unable to support the asylums required to accommodate and segregate the unfortunate victims thereof. They must remain at large—to perpetuate and multiply indefinitely their terrible afflictions.

Yet how is it possible that such weedy, half-sterilised creatures as are so many of our modern mothers, should bear sound and sane and vigorous offspring?

Inherited debilitation and defect are further aggravated by present-day educational methods.

Our modern rendering of the training of the young is the straining of the young.

Developing creatures should never be allowed to over-use function or faculty. Because to over-tire an immature faculty is to deplete its vital resources of development. Nor should young developing creatures be permitted to do anything too strenuously or for too long a time. Narrowness and mental warp result inevitably from too early and too long periods of concentration in one direction, of the ductile shaping brain.

In defiance, nevertheless, of this first principle of rearing, boys and girls, after the morning's brain-work, are kept at strenuous games for hours in succession.

Body and mind, after having been cramped between the covers of text-books, now are cramped within the narrow rules and rigid form of such miscalled "games," supervised by over-keen experts—the whole business exacting sustained muscular tension, temperamental excitement and competitive nervous strain. The powers are stretched to win some goal, in place of being unbent in leisure and in pleasure. True play is spontaneous enjoyment of the moment, not fierce concentration upon goals. This latter induces excitement, which may be pleasurable, but it entails its tax in reactionary exhaustion. Because of the spur of competition in them, sports and games, as now rendered, act as powerful nerve-stimulants that deplete and waste the vital powers.

School-boys and school-girls live, for the most part, in alternating states of high tension in sports and reactionary languors from the heart and nervous strain resulting therefrom.

Since sports and athletics became a cult, heart-diseases have increased by 50 per cent. We complain that our young men are limp and unintelligent, lacking in initiative and enterprise. Apart from the serious circumstance that, mentally, they have been trained for cricket, not for life, most of them (to employ their own phrase) have "gone stale" in heart and brain, in consequence of forced athletics, long before they come to the momentous business of living. Even their muscles have wasted, in place of developing. With the result that instead of being finely-built and graceful, numbers of our youths are stiff, stoop-shouldered and abnormally attenuated.

Education should aim at keeping young persons fresh and unstrained; charged with vital energies for growth of mind and body, filled with zest and enthusiasm for the career before them.

Everywhere, mothers deplore bitterly that they can obtain neither duty, obedience, nor affection from their girls. Many will not mend their clothes even; refuse so slight a domestic concession as to arrange flowers for the home. Lacking the morbid excitement of competitive rough games, an abnormal craving for which has been artificially created, and home-tastes extinguished, at school, modern girls are bored and disaffected save when indulging in sports or in other excitements. The more delicate, sympathetic, and humanising amenities have no appeal for them.

All the subtler, vital and inspiring impulses of natural womanhood have been rudely smothered in tussles of big muscles, in sensational crazes for making hockey-goals, and similar crude aims, quite alien to natural girlhood. The recurring stimulus of such, in addition to over-developing male muscles and proclivities in them, creates both the habit and the craving for excitement; effects pernicious and demoralising as are those of all habitual strong nerve-excitants.

It is impossible to exaggerate the cumulative effect of habit upon disposition—and this particularly upon the plastic, shaping dispositions of young girls.

Youth is at the mercy of its pastors and its masters, to spoil or to foster its best growth. We feed the bodies and cram the brains of our young people, while, in sending them away from the home which is their natural environment, we starve and dwarf their emotions and affections; giving these nothing to evoke, nothing to nurture them. The abnormal cold-heartedness and self-absorption latter-day mothers bewail in their girls are the inevitable outcome of their unnatural upbringing.

The spectacle of young women, with set jaws, eyes strained tensely on a ball, a fierce battle-look gripping their features, their hands clutching some or other implement, their arms engaged in striking and beating, their legs disposed in coarse ungainly attitudes, is an object-lesson in all that is ugly in action and unwomanly in mode. The so-called "tennis-grin," which on many women's faces does duty for smile, shows how the muscular tension of forceful effort permanently mars higher attribute. So too, the proverbial quarrelsomeness of tennis-playing women results from the combative habit of mind. Light and exhilarating, in place of strenuous competitive exercises, enable girls to develop their womanhood in healthy structure, efficient function, and beauty of body and mind. Dancing—the poetry of motion—particularly conduces to health and to grace. True dancing, that is, not the acrobatics of the professional dancer, which result in coarsened ugly limbs and stilted action.

There is a well-known Girls college which makes pre-eminently for the cult of Mannishness.

And here are seen, absorbed in fierce contest during the exhausting heat of summer afternoons, grim-visaged maidens of sinewy build, hard and tough and set as working-women in the forties; some with brawny throats, square shoulders and stern loins that would do credit to a prize-ring. All of which masculine developments are stigmata of abnormal Sex-transformation precisely similar in origin to male antlers in female-deer; namely, deterioration of important sex-glands, with consequent obliteration of the secondary Sex-characteristics arising normally out of the functional efficiency of these.

It has been said that the "hardening" process for children succeeds in rearing sturdy families, by killing off those of more delicate (and higher) organisation. And this and other such latter-day schools earn a reputation for rearing amazons, by so breaking the health and constitution of their more delicately-constituted members that these are compelled to withdraw. Following the rule that healthy bodies rebel in terms of illness against deteriorative conditions, it is the normal and healthfully-constituted girls who fail beneath such injurious strain. While organisations less sound of constitutional morale, in place of sustaining their typal ideals, conform to these deteriorative methods, and degenerate from higher to lower-grade standards of structure and function. Precisely as happens to minds when exposed to demoralising influences.

And to what end is it all? The training of modern young persons should fit them for Twentieth-Century existence in all its varied, complex and psychical developments. Yet now-a-days we train our girls as though their destiny were carpet-beating or the forge, rather than the higher human amenities. It is not surprising, therefore, that they frequently play hockey with the higher amenities. So impressionable and mimetic the sex is, and such its bent toward extremes, that women trained to Sports comport themselves in after-life as though playing a competitive game. A mental warp which has been one of the sources of latter-day strenuousness, as too of that fierce social rivalry which is wrecking older and fairer ideals and methods of friendship and hospitality.

Over-development of the large and cruder muscles dwarfs those smaller and more delicate ones which adapt to the softer and subtler departments of faculty. And while despoiling these smaller muscles which subtend gentle and delicate artistries, the crude larger ones, hypertrophied by athletic activities, become alike a burden and a curse to their possessor. Because not only is their upkeep a continual and a superfluous tax upon her vital powers, but their hunger for continued function in further such crude activities afflicts her with turbulent impulses, for which the more civilised vocations supply no scope. The militant Feminist movement was as much an explosion of suppressed muscularity in young women deprived of other outlet for accumulated muscle-steam, as it was an ebullition of masculine mentality on the part of its leaders.

Hysteria and other neuroses, obsessing hobbies and crazes, are, more often than not, morbid and distressing consequences of habits acquired at school and college, of developing abnormal high-pressures of muscular and nervous energy. Masculine war-occupations have similarly evoked male muscularity and mentality in women. So that—War over—they find it well-nigh unendurable to return to the more refined and humanising womanly employments of their pre-war days. While on the other hand, employers are bewailing the rough and coarsened manners, personality and speech, as too the clumsy movements and ineptitudes of domestic servants, nurses and others, de-sexed by War-work in respect of the higher qualities and efficiencies of their sex. Many of these sturdy motor-drivers, lusty W.A.A.Cs. and strapping Land-girls have lost all taste as well as aptitude for the finer arts of life and of the home. Efficient in the handling of plough or gun or lorry, woe to the hapless babe or invalid subjected to their hard, forceful touch!

V

Language is scarcely emphatic enough to characterise the painful (and insane) exhibitions of Public-school and College "Sports," in which boys and young men, whose vital forces are needed beyond all things for development, may be seen with faces whereon is neither joy of action nor pride of achievement, but only the pained rigidity of supreme heart and nervous strain, as they strive for goals that are no test of true physical fitness, but, on the contrary, prove physical lopsidedness.

In confirmation whereof is the fact that many such athletes die young, and die suddenly. Or they live the years when men should be still in their prime—valetudinarian and hypochondriac. The secret of health and nervous power is the constitutional capacity to store reserves of vital energy, for expenditure as required. Exhausting sports in youth engender habits of over-expenditure thereof.

Trials of skill and of strength are admirable spurs to development and self-discipline. But these should make for excellence in that fine poise of Mind and Muscle which is the hall-mark of human achievement, not for extremes of crude brute-force (muscle being the lowest grade of human powers) which strain the living mechanism; and, straining, leave inevitably weak and warped links, when not actually snapped ones therein. The human body is a marvellous and delicate psychological instrument, not a mere muscular implement. When the hearts of boys are "sounded" after competitive sports, "murmurs" are heard; showing valvular incompetency. Temporary in the majority of cases, but none the less indicative of gravely-weakened states which can but permanently injure the fine-spun valvular apparatus. "Dilated hearts" caused numbers of our "fine young athletes" to be rejected as unfit for military duty.

Young men "in training" suffer from albuminuria, showing serious derangement of the kidney-function; derangement which inevitably entails such permanent structural deterioration as lapses readily, in after years, to grave disease.

The fallacy that the excitement of games distracts the attention of youth from the processes of sex-development has been disproved. While all athletic boys are not vicious, it is now recognised that the most vicious are the athletic. The languors of body and mind reactionary upon the exciting strain of games are unwholesome languors; and breed unwholesome self-absorptions. A fresh and active imagination, to keep the mind interested at every turn, is the best of all safeguards. It is in the imagination, moreover, that higher moral and ideals arise.

It has been said that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton." It was far more likely won in the pages of Jack the Giant Killer! Because in war, as in most other things, moral is more potent than muscle. There is, it is true, a moral of Games. But its outlook and its application are both contracted of range and artificial of form. Games are useful in forming habits and in exercising faculties of co-operation in concerted action. But being played in company with others, and played in obedience to rule and regulation, they allow no scope for the development of individualism in mind or character, initiative or resource—outside the narrow boundaries of cricket-pitch or football field.

By perpetual absorption of the powers in the movements of a ball, the mind becomes contracted and set in puerile mould, during years when it should be germinating and expanding in response to the countless varied and inspiring stimuli and factors of natural environment. Over-keenness in sports destroys the sense of beauty, love of art and love of Nature.

The grey matter of the brain—the medium of Mind—wherein arise imagination, inspiration and those noble talents and the noble dreams of enterprise which make for noble lives—this highest and most complex of the human tissue-cells becomes starved and atrophied from continued waste of brain-resources by those lower-grade cerebral motor-tracts which control and energise the muscles.

The popular impression, both lay and medical, that muscular exertion supplies rest to the brain and recuperation to the nervous system, is a sad delusion. One cannot raise a finger without expending brain and nervous force, the muscles being implements by way of which the brain transforms purpose into action—being brain-implements therefore. So that brains—and particularly young brains—unduly taxed by muscular activities are robbed of power to develop or to function in their intellectual and other higher departments.

If my hypothesis be true, and the right side of the body with its allied brain-hemisphere is the executive and expenditure side, while the left is the Life and asset side, it is obvious that excessive brain-work, or Sports, for which the executive power is supplied by this right side and its allied brain half, must necessarily deplete and exhaust the left side, which is the power-house and reservoir of Life and Mind whence the executive half derives its mental, nervous and vital potential.

It goes without saying that such careful economy of the powers is superfluous in truly healthful and normally vigorous males. But latter-day stock has been, for the most part, so far depleted by generations of neglect of natural law as to require the strictest husbandry of its vital expenditure, in order to apportion its means to the best all-round advantage.

Object-lessons in such extremes of athleticism as destroy the normal balance of the counter-poising Sex-traits have been supplied by War.

The faces—as the natures—of some of our soldiers have become crude, coarse and deteriorate in intelligence, others abnormally harsh and fierce; the softer human qualities having been trampled out of them by stress of militarism, some to degrees of brutalisation and criminality, even. While a very great number show lined and haggard from heart or nervous strain.