FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DESTRUCTIVE OF WOMANLY ATTRIBUTES, MORALE AND PROGRESS

"A woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life."

I

In Woman and Labour, Miss Schreiner laments as follows, picturesquely but speciously: "Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (often those of men) produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples!"

A scene is conjured of brute-men with clubs savagely attacking and destroying hapless women's innocent spinning-wheels, as Mrs. Arkwright ruthlessly destroyed her husband's cherished models. Yet who, regarding the subject dispassionately, sees cause for anything but gladness that modern woman has not still to spin the linen of her household and the garments of its members—for anything but thankfulness for that intelligent male-brain which carried the woman-invention of the needle to its higher adaptations in the weaving and the sewing-machine? Who can justly regret that the taking over by men, in factories, of wholesale brewings and bakings, jam-makings, and so forth, has relieved the other sex of ceaseless drudgeries; and in so relieving it of drudgeries of house-keeping has left it free to develop the higher and the more intellectual arts of home-making?

"Slowly but determinedly, as the old fields of labour close up and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new," Miss Schreiner affirms. And to emphasise our determination, the demand is printed in her book, as I have reproduced it, in Italics.

Losing sight altogether of the inestimable benefits to woman secured by the intervention of men between her and the hardest and the most debasing employments, she further protests, "any attempt to divide the occupations in which male and female intellects and wills should be employed, must be to attempt a purely artificial and arbitrary division."

"Our cry is, We take all labour for our province!"

Nevertheless, clever and intuitive woman as she is, she confesses (now the Italics are mine), "It may be with sexes as with races, the subtlest physical differences between them may have their fine mental correlatives." And yet, oh why, having come upon so promising a vein of truth, did she not follow it to its logical conclusions, and find in it all the answers to her extremist demands, and, with these, the refutations of her Feminist plea and claims?

Men and women are unlike not only in "the subtlest physical differences" which "may have their fine mental correlatives." They are unlike in the most obvious and basic facts of physical constitution and of biological function. And these must inevitably entail mental and temperamental correlatives more intrinsic and farther reaching even than the subtler physical differences she recognises as being possibly modifying factors in psychical aptitude.

Advocating soldiering even for the sex, Miss Schreiner says: " ... Undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant-girl of France, who has carried latent and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general."

Here is fallacy again. Joan of Arc was, beyond all things, woman. Not the man in her, but the woman in her, and her Supra-conscious womanly attributes it was which (inspiring her by way of mystical voices and visions) impelled her so to transcend her woman-nature that without knowledge of arts military or of strategic science, as, too, without experience, she was able, by intuitive prescience, to lead her compatriots to victory. For the soldiers, perceiving the Light in her face, followed in awed confidence whithersoever she led.

In earlier days of civilisation, this intuitive and visionary faculty of woman was recognised and honoured.

II

In The Human Woman, Lady Grove presents a wholly contrary view to Miss Schreiner's.

With her, woman suffers less in being shut out from the labour-market than in having been driven from the home.

"The woman has been driven from her home into the labour-market. The fact of 82 per cent. of the women of this country working for their living is an ugly rebuff to the pretty platitudes about the home," she says.

" ... The stupendous mistake that has been made up to now is in supposing that it is men's judgment only that should decide questions, and hence the hopeless state of unravelled misery existing in the world, side by side with all the wealth and wonders of the age.

"If we examine the conditions of the working-classes, after years and years of male legislation, what a hideous set of conditions we find. Intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence among the poorer classes. And yet we spend over £22,000,000 annually on the education of these people. Surely there is something wrong somewhere. What is it that we, seeing this condition of things at our very door, have, as women, to be so grateful for in male legislation?"

The writer fails wholly to perceive that these factors she deplores as due to defective masculine legislation are effects less of faulty measures than of faulty Humanity. Measures are the gauge of the men who frame them. And men are very much the measure of the mothers who bore them. Those which she properly characterises as the "hideous" conditions of the working-classes, "intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence" are circumstances legislation cannot remedy unless the hearts of legislators are moved to do this, and their hands are empowered, moreover, to do it, by the collective will of those they represent.

Except all are content to subordinate their personal interests to the general welfare, and to improve their personal morale for their own and for the common good, Acts of Parliament can do but little. Drunkenness can be penalised by legislation, difficulties put in the way of obtaining drink. But intemperance can be effectually stamped out only by individual men and women so rising to higher levels of thought and self-control as voluntarily to become sober; or by men and women so improving in brain and constitution that the craving for drink—now recognised as a disease—no longer obsesses them.

Acts of Parliament may condemn insanitary and defective dwellings, may compel landlords to repair them to degrees of decency and comfort; may pull them down and build others in their stead. But none of these measures will eradicate the bad housing of dirty and comfortless, or of demoralised and demoralising homes. The best house possible becomes bad housing for its occupants when the woman at the head of it fails to do her duty therein, in consequence of industrial labour which leaves her neither time nor energy to make a clean, well-ordered, cosy and inspiring home of it; or because her own idleness or ignorance, her drunkenness or worthlessness, results in her neglect of it. Human conditions, like human measures, result from the personalities, good or bad, capable or incapable, of those who create them.

III

The Feminist's faith in the masculine prerogative of Legislation, as being a possible panacea—had she but part in it—for every ill beneath the sun, is one of her gravest disqualifications for taking part therein.

Legislators who are over-confident in the efficacy of The Law express their over-confidence in terms of premature and unduly-coercive legislation. Procedure which, more often than not, frustrates the ends to which it was designed by the methods taken to secure these. Progress is personal, moreover. It is the sum of the advance of individuals. Legislation is the statutory formulation of public opinion; it is not the source of this. It merely crystallises public opinion. But before crystallisation of thought (as of chemical) sets in, saturation-point must first have been reached throughout the medium wherein it occurs.

Were any other development required to show the utter inadequacy of Legislation to attain its ends—when not reinforced by personal co-operation and initiative—this has been supplied in that latter-day demoralisation of young girls, the consequences whereof will be vastly more baneful and farther-reaching in contributing to national decline than even that other dire factor of the flower of our virile youth struck down before its prime.

Girls are fully protected by law to the age of sixteen. Yet many of the demoralised girls seen consorting freely with Tommy or Reggie, according to their class, are well below that age. Legislation is powerless, however, failing parental vigilance and co-operation to invoke its aid. Nevertheless, with its characteristic blind confidence in the male prerogative of Law, Feminism now advocates raising "the age of consent" to eighteen. But to do this would no more protect the girl under eighteen than the existing law protects the girl under sixteen—or, for that matter, protects the girl of twelve. Law can do little or nothing unless, as happens so seldom and happens too late, parents requisition its assistance for menace or for punishment. Mothers themselves should see to it that their little daughters have neither temptation nor opportunity to consent to their own ruin.

IV

We saw lately a militant rising of women against men and their laws; the object being to compel concessions from the male by way of violence. And so short-sighted were the leaders of this Movement that not only did they seek to prove their right to make laws, by breaking them, but they showed themselves ignorant of the first rudiments of combat by electing to fight the enemy with his own weapon—that weapon of Force which is man's especial Fitness and Woman's Unfitness. Woman's Unfitnesses have prevailed, it is true, in the counsels of progress, but, obviously, they have not prevailed, nor can they ever prevail by being pitted directly against masculine strengths. Her way of supremacy is one by far more subtle and sublime.

The leaders of Militancy seem never to have suspected, moreover, that while they were demanding to be liberated from all womanly privileges, they were, nevertheless, waging their deplorable skirmishes from behind a strong wall of such privileges. Men who should have adopted such tactics would have received but short and scant shrift.

Were the sex to be confronted, indeed, with that "Fair field and no favour!" for which some members of it are so clamorous, these would find it a grievously different thing from the privilege they paint it.

Marcel PrÉvost has said that when men find women competing with them in fields of Labour, to degrees injurious to masculine interests, they will turn and strike them in the face. There are indications to the contrary, however. Among decadent races and savages, the emasculate sons of deteriorate mothers assert their masculine authority otherwise.

Far from combating their women's right to work, they force them to work—and to work in support of the males!

More and more every day, civilised men, indeed, released by working-wives from their natural obligation to maintain the family, are seen so to have lapsed from their sense of virile responsibility as to be coming further and further to shelve upon such working-wives the burden of the family support. Among the labouring and artisan classes, the wife's contribution to the exchequer leaves the husband more money to spend on drink or on gambling; or on both. In superior classes, too, it leaves husbands with more money to spend on amusement—of one sort or another.

Responsibility and effort are natural spurs to masculine development. Relieve the male of these and he degenerates. As woman released from child-bearing and the duties entailed by the family, degenerates rapidly. We can no more improve on The Plan than we can improve without each and every appointed factor of it.

V

Another disastrous blunder of Feminism is to make for equal wage for men and women.

The higher wage of men springs, economically, from the fact that the industrial output of women is, normally, less than that of men. But there is a deeper, and a biological significance involved. Which is, that men's greater output of work results from more of their energy of brain and body being available to them for work, because far less of their vital power is locked-up in them for Race-perpetuation and nurture. There is the implication also that man being the natural breadwinner of the family, his wage should suffice for its support.

A system of equal wages for the sexes would press as cruelly upon women as it would be disastrous to the Race. Because it would compel woman, despite the biological disabilities that handicap her economically, to force her powers to masculine standards of work and output. It would, moreover, by qualifying her to support the family, serve as cogent excuse for her husband to shirk his bounden duty.

The crux of the demand for equal pay for equal work is that, because of her natural lesser strength and endurance, when a woman is doing work identical in nature and equal in quantum to that of a man, it means that she is doing more than a woman's work, and is overtaxing and injuring her constitution, therefore; or it means that he is doing less than a man's work, and is "slacking," therefore.

A further important issue is that when rendered too easy by both husband and wife earning wage, marriage is entered upon far too lightly, and at too early and irresponsible ages, than happens when the whole burden of support rests with the man. Moreover, in such case masculine selection makes only too often for economic rather than for human values in the wife. A man upon whom is to fall the whole tax of supporting the home and the family regards marriage more seriously, and delays it until he is more mature of years and of settled position. Moreover, he chooses more carefully. And the Race benefits proportionally.

In manufacturing towns, with opportunity for both husband and wife earning wage, boy-and-girl marriages, feckless, discordant homes, and sickly degenerate, neglected children are the rule.

That women should be paid for work they do, a salary enabling them to live honestly and in comfort, goes without saying. Economics should be adjusted on a far higher basis than that mainly of a competitive struggle which allows the employer to fix wages less according to the value of work done, than by the number of persons at his mercy, who, in their eagerness to live, will undersell their values and thus cheapen labour. Nevertheless economics have, in a degree, adapted to the evolutionary trend. Because, in the main, the more skilled and difficult tasks are more highly remunerated than the less skilled, and are performed by the more fit. And not only are these better qualified to expend such higher remuneration intelligently, and with benefit to themselves and to the community, but they are able to secure thereby those better conditions which are the due and the need of families higher in the scale of humanity, and requiring, therefore, higher conditions of nurture.

The cases of colliers and of other rough-grade humans who earn wage beyond their mental calibre to expend intelligently, show how an income too large for its possessor leads to coarse and demoralising extravagances, rather than to personal happiness or elevation. (The like is true of many plutocrats.) War has shown us boys' lives wrecked by the same factor. No greater fallacy exists than that of supposing progress to lie in freeing persons from all disabilities—poverty, and other restrictive conditions.

Wives should be legally entitled to a just proportion of their husband's income, as a right, not merely as dole. This, in recognition of their invaluable work in home-making, and of their invaluable service to the State in producing and rearing worthy citizens for it.

VI

Masculine legislation, making all the while, in the face of economic difficulties, for the ever further release of women and children from the more laborious and debasing tasks, has made compulsory, in their own and in the interests of their unborn infants, a month of respite for expectant mothers, and a further month for mothers after delivery. Extending thus to these poor victims—beasts of the burden of toil, and beasts of the burden of sex—a mercy and consideration wholly lacking in the Feminist propaganda. For this latter repudiates indignantly all need for concession or privilege to wifehood or to motherhood, equally with womanhood.

To justify the claim for equality in all things, women must be forced, at all cost, to identical standards of work and production. To ask privileges and concessions would be to confess, in the sex, weaknesses and disabilities that must disqualify it from economic identity with the other.

Far, indeed, from such vain-glorious and disastrous straining for equality, the leaders of the Woman's Movement should, before all else, have demanded insistently still further industrial concessions and privileges for a sex handicapped for industry, by Nature. First and foremost, they should come into the open and boldly proclaim—what it is useless to deny, indeed—that in the function of parenthood, at all events, men and women are wholly dissimilar. They should reject outright all tinkerings and half-measures for relief of this great human disability, whereof one sex only bears the stress and burden for the benefit of both, and for survival of nations and races.

Not only for the pitiful respite of a month before and a month after the birth of her child, should the mother be prohibited from industrial labour. By that time all the damage will have been done. The power that should have been put into the evolution of her infant will have been put into the revolutions of a lathe. The life-potential that should have gone to build its living bone and brain and muscle will have gone to feed the life of a machine. The breath she will have drawn for it will have been contaminated by the dust and fumes of toil. Its poor nascent brain and faculties will have been dulled and depleted, stupefied and vitiated by the stress and turmoil of its mother's labours. Only the dregs of the maternal powers will have been invested in the Race. The finest and most valuable will have gone to swell the balance-sheets of Capital.

The trumpet-cry of The Woman's Movement should be, indeed, The Absolute Prohibition of young Wives and Mothers from all Industrial and Professional employment!

Such a prohibition, by lessening the competition of the labour-market, and by thus increasing the value of labour (which the flood of female industry inevitably cheapens) would automatically so increase the wage of men as to make of these true living wage, sufficient for the maintenance of home and family. Such a prohibition would, moreover, so diminish the competitive pressure among women as to make it possible for unmarried women, the future wives and mothers, as well as for the older spinsters and widows, to select in every fitting trade and industry, work suited to the lesser strength and endurance of the female brain and body.

VII

Nothing has characterised the Feminist Movement throughout so much as lack of knowledge of human nature (both masculine and feminine), lack of prevision to foresee the trend of new developments, lack of intuitive apprehension to gauge the issues of such trend. Its leaders have never suspected, accordingly, that, in propaganda and in practice, they have been tampering with a great biological ordinance; and that, in obliterating women's Sex-characteristics, they have been destroying that counterpoise of human powers and faculties whereon progress and permanence rest, and that morale which is the inspiration of advance.

Regarding their own masculine Rationalism as the ideal and standard for all women, they have believed it possible to shape all women successfully thereto. Nature is not to be thwarted, however. And when we destroy the balance of the Normal, abnormal developments—gravely mischievous and singularly difficult to deal with—crop up and require to be dealt with. One may raise the familiar cry that some modern developments are due to our being in "a transition stage." But from that remote day when Nature first evolved us as a race of amoebÆ, further to evolve into the human species, we have been always in "transition stages." Normal transition upwards is so slow an impulse as to be well-nigh imperceptible, however. Rapid change invariably betokens regression—descent being vastly easier and swifter in movement than ascent is.

Deplorably mistaken has been a doctrine of Emancipation which, by disparaging the arts domestic, has sent out young girls and women, indiscriminately, from the sphere domestic, to de-sexing and demoralising work in factories and businesses; and has engendered the race of stunted, precocious, bold-eyed, cigarette-smoking, free-living working-girls who fill our streets; many tricked out like cocottes, eyes roving after men, impudence upon their tongues, their poor brains vitiated by vulgar rag-times and cinema-scenes of vice and suggestiveness.

Some of our working-girls are charming-looking, pretty-mannered, pure of thought and life, of course. A small minority—alas, how small!—are normal of development and sound of constitution. But these are not the average. And it is the average with which a nation has to reckon.

Emphatically, men are not as women. In body and in mind they are by nature rougher, tougher, and vastly less impressionable. A regime that makes a boy will wreck a girl. Of more sensitive calibre, she requires more kindly, protective conditions, moral and industrial, than does he. Notwithstanding which, little girls now run the streets and take their chances as they may—in capacities of over-burdened errand-girl, telegraph-messenger, and otherwise—at ages when their developing womanhood requires due care of nurture, moral supervision, and freedom from physical strain. Sedentary occupations are a natural need of their sex, moreover, as is indicated by the breadth and weight of the female pelvis and hips, as too by the delicate adjustments of those important reproductive organs, the future products whereof are of inestimably higher national values than are the industrial assets of these poor children's labour. As Girl-guides and so forth, young girls parade our towns in meretricious (albeit hideous) uniform; developing thereby that love of publicity and of unwholesome excitement to which the sex is prone. Small girls just fresh from school are even now employed in barbers' shops to shave men; destroying thus in them, at the outset of life, that natural diffidence and reserve toward the other sex which are the first defences of womanly honour.

In demanding absolute emancipation, industrial and personal, Feminists had no other thought but that such new liberty would have widened woman's scope for usefulness, for happiness, for self-development. Yet what has been the outcome of it all? For one who has used her new freedom for the ends designed, very many more have used it to their serious injury; only too many to their moral downfall.

Already everywhere such liberty has fast degenerated into licence. Our girls were no sooner emancipated by their mothers from the usually wholesome—if sometimes too severe—control of their fathers, than straightway they have emancipated themselves from the indispensable maternal rule. Strict supervision and guidance in a world they are ignorant of—or if sophisticated are in far worse case—are essential to the well-being, physical and moral, of the young and immature.

Young girls, on first discovering their attraction for the other sex, become intoxicated by the sense of their new dangerously-alluring power, and lose their heads. Beyond all things, they require at this phase a mother's strict and careful supervision, with sympathy and firm control; to tide them over their perilous phase, and thus to preserve them from consequences of their ignorance or folly, or from those of a pernicious bent. Nevertheless, young girls of every class are granted now disastrous latitudes of thought and action. The vigilant chaperonage indispensable to protect them from the biological impulses—which they mistake for "love"—of the careless or vicious young men to whom (equally with the chivalrous and honourable) modern mothers abandon their daughters, has become a dead-letter. The girl only just in her teens is free to play fast-and-loose with boys and men—as too with life, before she has learned the merest rudiments of living. All too soon she learns her lesson. And becoming precociously sophisticated—only too often precociously vicious—her nature and future are wrecked at the outset. Because nothing wrecks a woman's disposition so effectually as sex-precocity does. Sex is the very pivot of her nature. On this she swings up—or down. And early habit decides her bent.

That many of these cigarette-smoking, decadent young creatures are no worse than impudent, feather-brained and misguided, does not save the licence allowed them from being as harmful to physical as it is perilous to moral health; nor from the experiences resulting from such licence wholly unfitting the majority for later wholesome restraint, and for purer and fairer ideals of womanly conduct and living.

For much of this Feminism is gravely to blame. Not only because it has led to the absorption of the mothers in outside pursuits, as being of greater importance than the fulfilment of their maternal duties and responsibilities to their young daughters, but because, too, the partial sterilisation of girls, by masculine training and habits, in robbing them of womanly qualities, robs them of natural reserve and modesty, and of the other more delicate instincts and aspirations of their sex.

Significant, truly, of latter-day maternal neglect of young daughters was the disclosure by a doctor, in a recent British Medical Journal, that of a hundred men infected with venereal diseases, more than seventy had contracted disease from "amateur flappers." Yet as with a child badly burned by playing with fire, we blame the mother or guardian who exposed it to danger of thus injuring itself for life, so the mothers of these unfortunate girls were to blame for gross neglect of their duty to safeguard these young lives.

Nature avenges her betrayed girls, however. For medical authority shows that these youthful unfortunates transmit disease in its most virulent and destructive forms. It is as though all the vital potential of their developing womanhood is perverted to a malign poison, charged with the forces of their blasted youth.

* * * * *

The Victorian, who brought up her daughters to marry in ignorance of biological fact, went to the other extreme. But it was a far less harmful one than that in vogue to-day.

Like that of the child, the immature, susceptible mind of a girl, incapable of apprehending the sex-factor in its true perspective with the other factors of life, becomes unduly dominated by consideration thereof when too early instructed. She is far better left, for so long as is practicable, ignorant or hazy concerning this vital phenomenon, in place of being fully informed, as girls are now-a-days. So that they know all that there is to be known about sex—except its seriousness and sacredness. And divorced from the seriousness and sacredness of Love and Birth—which mere knowledge of biological fact is wholly inadequate to impart—such knowledge of fact presents a crude and bald distortion of the truth; only too often imparting an ugly and demoralising warp to mind and conduct. Ignorance is not Innocence, 'tis true, but it serves the same purpose in safeguarding innocence that clothes do in safeguarding modesty. And for one girl who falls in consequence of innocence, twenty fall from sophistication.

Unless masculine traits have been over-developed in her by abnormal training, in which case (as occurs sometimes in the quasi-masculine woman of middle-age) sex-instinct may acquire an unnatural and quasi-masculine insistence, this instinct is, in the normal girl, responsive rather than initiative. (Wherein she differs diametrically from the male.) And such natural dormancy may be advantageously preserved by haziness of knowledge, and by the careful surveillance required for protection of immature minds and powers. The bald, matter-of-course view-point of many modern girls with regard to sex, their knowledge of vice, and their cynical acceptance and discussion thereof, as too of the vulgar intrigues of notorious dancers and peeresses, to say nothing of the ugly and debasing personal experiences only too many of them have incurred, are among the evils of the injurious licence at present accorded to young persons.

Feminism, having thrust such disastrous liberty on creatures as eager to grasp as they are unfitted to cope with the dangers thereof, is striving now, by way of women-patrols and police-women, to stem the evil with one hand—while with the other, it continues to open the flood-gates still wider. The only way to stem the evil is to stem it at its source. The home, with the vigilant supervision and guidance of a mother whose duty is publicly recognised and her authority strengthened thereby, whose time and faculties are devoted mainly to the making of home and to the safeguarding and disciplining of the young creatures she has brought into existence, is environment and shelter as indispensable to the impressionable youth of both sexes—but more particularly to the impressionable youth of one—as it is for the rearing of infancy and childhood. Such home-influences, reinforced by the strong hand of a father who likewise recognises his parental responsibilities, are the first of all the rights that matter for young womanhood.

Later, should come a term of domestic service. Mistresses of households should realise not only their human but likewise their national responsibility to these young humbler members thereof. No other public service possible to them would equally conduce to national progress.

As fathers are legally responsible for debts of sons under age, mothers should be responsible to the State for the virtue of daughters under sixteen.

In the personal, vastly more than in any other field of operation, woman's chiefest value lies. When she exchanges it for public functions, and seeks to further progress by officialdom and politics, by institution of women-patrols, police-women, Mayoresses, and so forth, the supreme importance of the personal factor becomes impressed by the discovery of the utter inadequacy of any substitute to take its place. "If mothers did their duty, there would be no need for us," a woman-patrol stated recently.

By the time young women have reached such phases of demoralisation that their conduct in public demands the intervention of police-women, it is too late to reform them, moreover. They will have lost the best promise and hope of their womanhood.

And so it is and must be ever all along the line. The home and the family are the nursery of civic as they are of racial progress. We regard it as proof of civilisation that Law-Courts for Children have been instituted. Yet what a blot it is, in truth, upon both parentage and parenthood that, in our day of enlightenment, such should have become necessary.

So have mother influences and maternal sense of responsibility declined, however, that mothers on all sides openly confess their utter lack of power to control boys and girls just in their 'teens.

VIII

The fashion is to pity and deride the "poor" early Victorian because she lacked the manifold and nerve-wracking outlets for that restlessness and boredom from which modern women suffer.

The "poor" Victorian was a more harmonious, better-balanced and more tranquil being, however. And she was far less cursed with "nerves," with feverish unrest and carking discontent, than women are to-day.

Mrs. Craigie observed that the Victorian, with her backboard and gentle accomplishments, produced (without the pusillanimous expedient of "Twilight Sleep") notably stronger, finer, and more clever children than do present-day over-educated or athletic women—athletic women, whose muscles of arms and of legs have so sapped the powers of important internal muscles that most of them are incapable of bringing their infants into life without instrumental aid.

One does not, for a moment, counsel reversion to the type or to the methods of an earlier generation. Evolution and development must advance, and are, of course, advancing satisfactorily in some stock. But the Victorian served her generation nobly, producing splendid specimens of men and women, and handing on a generous racial constitution—now being squandered recklessly, alas! by her descendants. The tide of greater freedom, of broader outlook, and fuller effectiveness for woman has set in, however. Albeit, owing to Feminist misapprehensions, it is not only moving too rapidly but it is moving in a wrong direction; because in direct opposition to biological law.

By their fruits ye shall know them. And the Victorian so preserved her woman-powers and attributes that she was an excellent and a contented wife, and could bring into existence—without instrumental aid—a family of comely, clever boys and girls; nurse them all from eldest to youngest; rear and discipline and put such stuff of health and sanity and enterprise into them as shames some flimsy, feeble-minded, characterless modern stock. We have far to look to-day, indeed, for statesmen and soldiers, poets and artists, business and craftsmen, and other such virile and talented personages as those early and pre-Victorian mothers endowed their epoch with.

And were further evidence needed that our great-grandmothers equalled our own women in the qualities we pride ourselves upon as triumphs of Feminism, the strength and courage, the resource and fortitude those others showed throughout the stress and horrors of the Indian Mutiny are proof sufficient that, beneath their gentler virtues, lay the sterner fibre of nobility.

IX

To prove to what a third-grade power Woman, once so potent an inspiration of life, has lapsed, we need but go to The Drama—reflex ever of its period. Consider Shakespeare's women—subtly wise, profoundly clever, beautiful and gracious, true and charming, strong and tender, chaste and gay; warm with temperament, crystal-sparkling with wit and parry!

And comparing these adorable beings with the posturing, tricky, intriguing, slangy, spotty creatures—neurotic unfaithful wives and erratic "bachelor"-daughters—of the modern stage, the deplorable deterioration of our womanly ideals becomes patent.

Women have sinned in every age, but they have sinned in some ages picturesquely and pathetically, because Nature led them. While the morbids and neurotics of our modern Plays are for ever noisily turning out the dusty corners of their warped psychologies, in order to discover some loose end of Nature in them to condone their erotic eccentricities. Strange, that Twentieth-Century woman tolerates the mirror held to her in these abnormal and distasteful creatures!

The modern dramatist is handicapped in his art, it is true, by lack, in our latter-day actresses, of that personal charm and magnetism, and the vital power to render the higher and subtler emotions and passions, whereby the actresses of earlier days held audiences spell-bound.

Politics and Sports destroy alike the Muses and the Graces. One who attempts to combine them with the delicate psychological arts and artistries of The Drama is bound to failure—in her art, at all events.

Time was when the best men reverenced women as beings of more delicate calibre, to be shielded from the rougher and grosser contacts of life. Chivalry forbade that they should have taken these to coarse exhibitions, prize-fights and the like. And to such restriction woman's purer instinct and her finer taste assented.

The male being practical and rational, however, since women themselves are changing all that, he too is coming to believe that any and every thing is good enough for a sex which more and more repudiates its subtler quality.

That native delicacy which preserved her once from masculine habits of thought and indulgence, taught man to realise woman as belonging, by nature, to a purer and daintier order. (Howsoever inferior to himself in some other respects he may have held her.)

It won his reverence and worship that these frailer and more exquisitely-constituted creatures should possess, despite their exquisiteness, such fine mettle of resistance in their softness as withstood the fire and urgence of the masculine siege; that within their (possibly) ignorant little brains was light that flashed straight to intrinsic truths and right courses of action; such intuitive apprehension of The Good and The Beautiful, without experience of the base and ugly, as taught them to distinguish clearly, to select, and to hold fast to the fairer in thought and in conduct.

To encounter in woman his own traits touched to higher, subtler issues, and transformed to novel and alluring quality by the charm and graces of another sex, has made always an enchanting, an inspiring, and a baffling enigma of her—to endue woman for man with eternal values and impenetrable mystery. For he has visioned in her—without formulating—the mystery of the Human Duality.

Trembling in the delicate poise of her twofold being, between the soft impressionable, variable woman in her and the man of steel Æsthetically sheathed within the velvet of her womanhood, the play of her swift supple transitions, the kaleidoscopic changes of her perpetual new combinations—giving ever fresh bewildering effects of colour, light and mode—have made her infinite variety for him. While her soft, immediate adjustments to his own moods and needs have been his wonder and delight; presenting to him all that there is in himself, yet in modes impossible to himself. All that he knows by acquaintance she knows by intuition—and in a fresh and fairer way. All that he sees, her eyes make him see again in new and more exquisite lights. All that he thinks had been already in her woman-heart ere ever man began to think. All that he loves she shows him a reason for loving—yet not by way of reason. All that he craves with his soul, her soul can confer. All that his body and sense have desired, her body and sense can bestow—But with all the immeasurable differences and enhancements of her unlike sex.

"Away, away!" cried Jean Paul Richter, apostrophising Music, "thou speakest to me of things that in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find!"

Wagner said, "Music is a Woman."

Dr. Havelock Ellis, himself a zealous Feminist, has said, that, in their ardour for emancipation, women sometimes seem anxious to be emancipated from their sex. While Ellen Key, most impartial of critics, observes:

"But full of insight as they are into the ars amandi, have modern women, indeed, learned how with all their soul, all their strength, and all their mind to love? Their mothers and grandmothers—on a much lower plane of woman's erotic idealism—knew of only one object; that of making their husbands happy.... But what watchful tenderness, what dignified desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of these spiritually-ignored women develop! The new man lives in a dream of the new woman, and she in a dream of the new man. But when they actually find one another, it frequently results that two highly-developed brains together analyse love; or that two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over love.... Of love's double heart-beat—the finding one's self, and the forgetting one's self in another—the first is now considerably more advanced than the second."

The reason why the New man and the New woman, having found one another, find no more inspiration or sweetness each in the other than to "fight out a disintegrating battle" is because both are male of brain and bent—one normally so, the other abnormally.

And when two males meet, their nature is—to fight!

* * * * *

Into every clause of this book must be read the many inspiring exceptions to be found among those modern men and women and children who are advancing normally along evolutionary lines. Such are so fine of type, in body and in mind, that they blind not a few to facts of racial deterioration. We point to these and say: One cannot speak with truth of the degeneracy of nations which produce such noble specimens!

These exceptions prove the principle I am endeavouring to impress, however. That were we to apply ourselves to correction of our biological and social errors, we have with us stock of the noblest Race conceivable, and the noblest possible future for that Race.