DANGEROUS SEPARATION OF WOMEN INTO TWO ORDERS: FEMINISTS AND FEMININISTS

"Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of Man."

I

Since women possess native gifts of highly-differentiated faculties and aptitudes, not only their greatest effectiveness, but, too, their well-being and happiness lie in finding highly-specialised and selective application for these, in Life, in Art, in Science, and in Industry.

Their rÔle in every field of operation should be recognised as being wholly different from that of man, however; and their own natural view-points and special abilities should be fostered, accordingly, by suitable training; in order to fit them for the special departments for which they are essentially suited.

The charming artistry and fancies, spontaneous and full of delicate insight, feeling, and sense of line, which a woman puts into her illustrations of a child's Fairy-story, are art as true, for example, and if less great of achievement, are nevertheless as intrinsically valuable in The Scheme of Things as are the virile masterpieces of a Michael Angelo or Turner.

Few men attain the exquisite artistry in colour that even indifferent women-painters show. It is an expression, in mentality, of the biological fact that the colour-sense is naturally so highly developed in woman that Colour-blindness—comparatively common among men—is rare indeed in her.

On the other hand, woman is inherently weak in drawing. When she is trained, however, to draw with masculine strength and precision, she loses her natural freedom and delicacy of touch, her sensitive feeling for line, her exquisite colour-sense, her fertile fancy. Rosa Bonheur's horses are as strong in drawing as they are baldly deficient in sentiment. Men have painted horses bolder still in line, but nevertheless noble and beautiful in feeling.

The same is true of Literature. Mrs. Browning would have been a great poet had she not taken her husband for model. Some of her delicate woman-fancies, tricked out in Robert Browning's over-virile style, are like charming women masquerading in fustian trousers.

George Eliot, too, affected the masculine both in viewpoint and method—a bad habit which so grew upon her that her later novels are ponderous as political treatises, and devoid of human interest.

Far different, Charlotte BrontË. True to herself and to her sex, she wrote and has written for all time—as those others did not—as a woman, and as only a woman could have written. Jane Austen, likewise.

The woman point-of-view and method are regarded, for the most part, however, as mark of the amateur—the model aimed at being the eternal masculine in mode and trend.

If the demand, "We take all labour for our province!" be safeguarded by recognising and differentiating the province into two distinct and separate—supplementary and complementary—departments, for the respective labours of the two widely differing sexes, the claim comes first within the range of reason and discretion.

As woman was the first doctor, so she was the first artist. Man inherits from her not only his artistic faculty, but he derives from her his faculty of creative inspiration. Applying his native intelligence, his executive ability and power of sustained effort, to this end, he has so developed The Arts as to have carried these to their modern realisations. And though woman, in her turn, may learn of him, it by no means follows that his standards or technique are best adapted to her modes of inspiration, to her ideals or attainments.

Trained along the lines of natural inherences, and trained, accordingly, without injury or warp to health or faculty by straining after standards not their own, women would not be disqualified, as so many are now by avocational specialisation, for wife and motherhood. They would, on the contrary, be the better adapted. And health and charm and emotion not having been sacrificed in them by de-sexing pursuits, such would be eagerly sought. Thus Racial advance would be secured by its wives and mothers having been drawn from the best orders of women; the women naturally endowed with faculty and character; self-reliant, but unspoiled by abnormal training.

A number of latter-day women being unfitted, alike by nature and by inclination, for marriage, two orders of the sex should be clearly distinguished and administered for; as being wholly different types, for whom wholly different creeds and employments are indicated.

Those whose aims and talents incline them to public careers should be content with the lot to which they are best suited; and content to accept the privileges thereof, and the disabilities thereof. They should not be greedy, and demand, at the same time, the liberty of the free-lance and the privileges of the wife and the mother.

So with the wife and mother. She, for her part, must forgo the liberty of the free-lance. Because, with her privileges, she has undertaken functions and duties which, for their complete fulfilment, demand her best powers and activities.

Men who marry are similarly restricted. The bachelor lacks the interests and happiness of the husband and father. The husband and father lacks the personal liberty and the freedom from responsibility enjoyed by the bachelor.

It is women, mainly, who demand both the prerogatives of the married and of the unmarried states. Notwithstanding that it is wholly impossible for them to fulfil the functions of both, because it is impossible for them to possess either the aptitudes or the energies for both.

In view of all that men have attained by devotion of their lives to the civilised achievements which now dignify existence and ennoble faculty, when one sees women more clamorously confident in their bounden right to inherit lightly all that the other sex has so laboriously won than they are reverently grateful for the inestimable human privileges and the treasuries of Art and Mind-wealth available to them by way of these surrendered masculine lives, it seems cause for indignation equal to that aroused by the phlegmatic calm wherewith most men accept as matter-of-course—instead of as matter for reverent gratitude—the gifts of Life and Faculty, to evolve and to transmit which to them, their mothers and all the generations of mothers before them surrendered their lives and their powers.

Recognition of the intrinsic differences, in trend and in function, between the sexes, should go far to dispel misconceptions and points of variance between them. The prevailing notion that the one sex is a sort of muddled version of the other—and not a highly-specialised presentment of an invaluable order of qualities, with inevitable shortcomings in the complementary order of qualities—is greatly to blame for sex-misapprehensions and antagonisms.

II

Feminists anticipate that War-experiences will further and finally eliminate all economic sex-distinctions, by having supplied convincing object-lessons that their sex is able to do, and to do efficiently, all that the other sex can do.

Far from object-lessons in the suitabilities, however, the experience has furnished terrible examples pointing the contrary way. Because although women have shown themselves both willing and efficient in these new capacities, results have proved at what cost to themselves and to life they have done men's work. Apart from a deplorable deterioration in morale, showing both in coarseness and in viciousness, the blight of age which has swooped upon both young and old, as direct consequence of the hardship and strain of masculine employments, robbing them of youth and health and joy and beauty, of repose and higher appeal, and transforming them into the grim, drab, harassed spectres many have become, should be warning enough, in all conscience, of whither Feminism is leading us.

Many of our young women have become so de-sexed and masculinised, indeed, and the neuter state so patent in them, that the individual is described (unkindly) no longer as "She" but as "It."

Dire have been the disillusionment and bitterness among our fighting men, upon returning to the homes and wives or loves they had long dreamed of—to find the wife or love a shattered wreck, or a strenuous, graceless, half-male creature; the home a place of nerve-racking unrest.

It is consoling to know that a number of those who have been de-sexed merely, and not disabled, will continue to find useful and contented outlet for their masculine developments in filling still the places of our fallen heroes. Cruelty lies in the fact, however, that the womanhood of many will have been wrecked quite needlessly; by strain of superfluously strenuous drill and marchings, scoutings, signallings, and other such vain and fruitless imitations of the male.

The greatest care should have been exercised to have selected the strong and able-bodied, the older women and the women of the characteristic worker-type (corresponding to the sterile female-worker of the bee-hive), for the rougher and the more exhausting tasks. The young wives and mothers and the young girls should have been rigorously excluded from such.

Of all human prerogatives, the greatest is that of being preserved, by class, by ability, by means, or by privilege, from gravitating to levels of work that coarsen and debase; or that, at all events, do not exercise and foster the development of higher tastes and faculty. And this human privilege is, in proportion to their degrees of civilisation, accorded to women by all civilised peoples. As men have stood between them and the perils of battle and shipwreck, the slaying of wild beasts, pioneering, exploring, and the like, so they have stood between them and the coarsest, ugliest, and most debasing industrial functions.

Nevertheless, Feminist anger at restriction whatsoever in the matter of employment ignores all cause for gratitude on the part of the sex, that, being at man's mercy as she is, civilised woman is no longer (as the woman of inferior civilisations is still) a beast of heavy burden. Far otherwise, indeed, Feminism aims at nothing so much as to repudiate her established privileges, abolish all distinctions, and to make woman once again that beast of burden the chivalry of man—at first instinctive, later magnanimous—has progressively rescued her from being.

And yet the degree to which sex is defined in Labour (as in Life) is at the same time the gauge and the cause of human development. Wheresoever are found low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress, there the women are employed in men's work. Wheresoever women are employed in men's work, there are low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress.

"Thank Heaven for the War!" Feminists have said, however, "because it has enabled our sex to prove its worth—by enabling us to quit ourselves like men. The world knows now that women can conduct omnibuses, drive ploughs, clean stables, kill chickens, ring and slaughter pigs, quite as well as men can."

It is as painful as it is amazing to find intelligent and cultured persons so blinded by the obsessions of their creed as to suppose that in ploughing and hoeing and making munitions, women are doing finer and more valuable work than they had been doing previously; that the woman bus-conductor is a more important person than the children's nurse; that to drive a cab or clean a boiler is a nobler occupation than the teaching of music or the cleansing of clothes; that to spread manure is more dignifying than to make beds; to amputate the limbs of wounded soldiers is superior to the subtler, far more difficult art of medically treating the complex ills of women and children.

That these other employments have been demanded by the times, is undeniable; as, too, that honour and credit are due to those who well and capably responded to the exigencies of the hour. But this does not, in the least degree, lessen the illogic of the claim that such response to the cruder and less-civilised demands of War proved woman's value more than did the devotion and efficiency she was previously showing in the far more complex and progressive arts of Peace. The main value of her War-work was that it fitted the times. But the times have been woefully out of joint!

III

At a recent Feminist Meeting, one of the leaders of Militancy detailed to an audience of fierce-eyed, sombre-visaged members of her own sex, and sundry meek-browed persons of the other, her latest exploits in the matters of arranging Labour disputes and averting strikes of working-men; of sending Governmental male officials to the right-about, and of disposing, in general, of masculine concerns.

The main issue of her story was lost sight of, alike by herself and by her audience. This was—or so it seemed to one among the latter: What manner of men were these who required or tolerated it that a woman should take them thus in hand, and, as though they had been whipped children, dispose of them and their men's affairs—between worker and employer, between man and man? What order of creature will be the sons and the grandsons of men ever further emasculated by every further generation of subjection by such masterful persons; female-Dominants who arrogate the virile rights and prerogatives of their menkind; their initiative and enterprise; their capacity to think, to speak, to plan and to act for themselves?

The Subjection of woman by man—What was that evil compared with this other enormity: the Subjection of man by woman, which is fast replacing it?

Men who—saving under stress of War—permit women to usurp the functions and prerogatives of their natural domain, in capacities of Mayor, of Chairman of Companies and so forth, are, frankly speaking—Muffs!

Not of such sires were our great Anglo-Saxon Races gotten. Not such was it who have made England what she is! And the England we look to will never be the England we look to—until such effeminate blood shall have been bred out of her sons.

The male becomes emasculate when women invade his domain. And with the increasing Hugger-mugger of the sexes, it grows, every day, more and more difficult for men to escape into the bracing, invigorating environment and moral of their own sex—a moral untempered by amenities due to the other, and one indispensable to string them to the pitch of virile thought and action. Our sailors and soldiers and aviators are still men, because woman has not so far invaded the Navy, the Army, or the Air.

Feminine invasion everywhere else—in schools and colleges, in the arts, in politics, in commerce and in sports—is undoubtedly enfeebling the fibre of our manhood and the quality of masculine achievements. Man is a pioneer; aggressive, progressive, ever breaking new ground; conquering new territory and new forces of Nature. And this alike in politics, in commerce, and in other material affairs. When he fails to pioneer, reaching out to new horizons of thought and activity, engineering new enterprises, while at the same time strengthening and consolidating all he had already acquired—then the world, in place of progressing, regresses. And for pioneering, whether in political or in geographical regions, woman's presence hampers him.

The less men are in a position to escape from the other sex, the more they lose the impetus and characteristics of their own.

The like applies to women. Women who mix too much and too freely with men deteriorate signally in womanly values and quality.

Both sexes benefit by segregation from the other, in order to adapt—each to its own characteristic morale and moral. Neither sex is wholly unconstrained and candid when in company of the other—unless both are demoralised.

Sex operates as a stimulant. And to be always under influence of a stimulant is enervating. On the other hand, when, from over-indulgence, Sex or any other stimulant ceases to release new inspiration and forces, it is sign of a permanently enervated state. Or sex operates as a hypnotic. And to be always under hypnotic influence is as destructive of individuality as it is fatal to achievement.

The sexes require to separate, accordingly, in order to derive fresh impulse on coming together again.

Both work more seriously and sincerely, more efficiently and more effectively, apart; taking counsel, when need be, one of the other.

The dilettante spirit and amenities of mixed companies, destructive of "thoroughness," are greatly to blame for that decline of British commerce which has followed on the Feminist invasion of business-houses.

Significant of the trend is the fact that young and pretty and inefficient girls are selected for business positions, as clerks and so forth, while older women of experience and accredited ability are rejected summarily. It is, doubtless, amusing and flattering to masculine employers to be surrounded by attractive youth of the opposite sex. But it is conducive neither to commercial enterprise nor to achievement.

IV

Because of the intrinsic variability underlying her duality of constitution, the happy mean and balance (difficult to all humans) are especially difficult to woman.

Man, like herself, is of dual constitution. But he is more firmly, because less finely, poised between his two orders of Traits. She, on the contrary, tends to oscillate between the opposite extremes of her two-sided nature. A bent which may be traced, throughout history, in the excesses, in one or the other direction, that have characterised the careers of many famous women-personages.

The Ultra-Feminine extreme, which results from lack of due balance of her woman-side by the masculine side of her, and the Mannish extreme, occasioned by over-development of her masculine inherences, may be regarded as, respectively, the Scylla and Charybdis—the rocks of the Male-traits, or the vortex of the Female-traits—whereon, equally, may be wrecked the noblest characteristics and the highest values of the sex, when it fails to steer clear, in medias res, of either.

In a number of women, the Feminist and the Femininist (Ultra-Feminine) types alternate in the same person. In place of being stably and permanently centred in the woman-side of them, with the masculine to steady and intelligise, such persons act and re-act, in more or less violent pendulum-swing, between their two orders of impulse. Thus we get women, intellectual, progressive, strenuous, engrossed for part of their time in serious, perhaps in public avocations—and then plunging, in violent recoil, into social frivolities; vanities, dissipations, pranks, intrigues, excesses.

Men, too, act between extremes. In far less degree, however. Life demands from most of them over-accentuation and concentration of their male-abilities, in physical and mental specialisations. And in reaction, they plunge into follies and vices. But the more virile keep their heads, and preserve a certain stability and conformity in their aberrations. While effeminate men, it is mainly who lapse into vicious excess.

Since woman supplies the inspiration and the morale of life, however, and since her momentous function of motherhood empowers her to make or to mar the Race whereof she is creatrix, a nation has a greater claim upon its women, and has, at the same time, more reason and more right to restrict their liberty of action, and to direct their bent, than it has in the case of its men. Its survival and its downfall tremble in the scales of Life which woman holds. To compensate her for such restriction and limitation of her scope, obviously it owes her privileges, personal and economic. And a subconscious recognition of this fact has been, doubtless, the source of such privileges as she now enjoys.

There have always been, as history shows, women in whom, from faulty heredity or culture, or from stress of circumstance, the Male-traits have been abnormally developed; virile-brained, stout-hearted, muscular chieftainesses, chatelaines, abbesses, matrons; or (in less agreeable guise) amazons, shrews and viragoes. But always such were recognised as being abnormal, and for the most part as being repellant. It was not sought to manufacture them. It is only of late years that Mannishness has become a serious Cult.

And now a dangerous thing has happened. Because where formerly symptoms of Feminism attacked individuals only—and these mainly the mature and eccentric—now the young and the normal are being indoctrinated wholesale. Young girls taken during the malleable phases of growth and development, and forcibly shaped to masculine modes, become more or less irretrievably male of trait and bent; losing all power to recover the womanly normal.

While on the other hand, there are assembling to-day, in an opposite ever-increasing and menacing camp, those others for whom Feminism, with its extremist, exacting, self-reliant codes and modes, has no appeal; the pretty mindless, the idle frivolous, the pleasure-seeker, the freakish and the conscienceless—in a word, the Ultra-Feminines; in whom the woman-failings are unfortunately more conspicuous than are the woman-virtues. Between these two extremes stand (and stand so far in gratifying number) the natural, admirably-balanced, noble and invaluable Moderates—normal women content to be normal women, and to fulfil the destined rÔle of such. And these are the saving grace of nations.

Apart from these, the sex is ever further and more dangerously separating into the two extremist camps; the Mannish and strenuous, and the Over-Feminised and purposeless, more or less idle and frivolous, selfishly absorbed in clothes, in luxury and pleasures; exacting masculine tribute in mind and kind, with but little return in affection or ministry.

In place, accordingly, of that fine normal poise of the Contrasting Man and Woman-Traits—which is the way of Evolution and of Progress—there is being substituted in the sex this degenerative segregation of its Traits in two wholly opposite, and equally lopsided types. And of these, the purposeful and strenuous, all the while making for masculine standards, are all the while further discarding the beauty, the emotions, the delicacy and morale of true woman; while the mindless and vain, the attractive and charming, are more and more divorcing themselves from purpose, from seriousness, from noble endeavour and usefulness.

And since rights accorded to women are shared by all, every new privilege Feminists win for the sex in the sweat of their assiduous brows—liberty, latchkeys and general latitude—the Ultra-Feminines snatch, and apply to frivolous and profitless, or to demoralising ends; licence, extravagances, vices.

The Ultra-Feminine, for the most part shallow and mindless (although many clever women belong to this order), absorbed in complacent culture of her oftentimes alluring personality, enhancing it, attiring it, developing its charm and graces, eager of homage and of tribute, is example of that Parasitism Miss Schreiner condemns in the sex; example of qualities normally making for beauty, but from loss of balance, owing to warp, hereditary or of misdirection, morbidly feeding upon themselves.

This Parasitism is seen in its worst guise in the vast armies of prostitutes, who in every clime and epoch ravage the fair fruits of human life and achievement.

Against this Parasitism in herself, self-absorbing, self-indulgent, enervating—defect of her reposefulness, of her Æstheticism and vital self-consciousness—every woman needs to be upon her guard; to repress with firmness the smooth easy lapse it prompts toward sloth and pleasure; to exorcise the soft dry-rot of it, by power of aspiration and by prayer of ministry. (For noble truth it is that Laborare est orare.)

The Woman's Movement did good service for the sex in the early chapters of its history, when it made for due education of woman's higher masculine inherences; intelligence, application, self-reliance; as also in finding further fields of usefulness and self-expression for her.

But unfortunately in the later chapters, over-cultivation of these traits has increasingly annulled and extinguished her own. And this with the unforeseen, disquieting resultant that a compensatory movement has set in apace among that other faction of the sex. So that the more mannish the Feminists become in mode and aim, the more womanish become the Effeminates. Thus, albeit sincerely despising and decrying this, Feminism has nevertheless indirectly fostered the growth of Effeminacy. While, by supplying it with ever further liberty and scope for the indulgence of its freaks and failings, Feminist propaganda has directly played into its hands. Motherhood strikes deeper roots of attribute even in the Ultra-Feminine; brings thin streams of altruism to her neurasthenic breasts. In her children she forgets clothes, grows less greedy of masculine tribute, forgoes pleasures and excitements that had been the breath of life to her.

The increasing emancipation of the sex from home-functions and from womanly and mother-duties, however—claimed and obtained with a view to further economic scope and application of its powers—has been exultantly hailed and exploited by the Ultra-Feminines for ever further indulgence of and wider range of action for their dangerous defects. And Feminism will find—and this soon to its dismay—that the battle it has waged against the other sex has been as nothing to the battle it has yet to wage against its own, in the person of the Eternal Effeminate; idle, luxurious, parasitic and effete, who, with her brood, engenders the dry-rot which crumbles mighty civilisations, or topples them in Revolution.

V

Of the two camps, the vast majority of masculines will always seek their loves and wives among the Ultra-Feminines; frail and erratic, but attractive and more or less womanly. So long as men are men, the feminine graces, even in their spurious forms of Effeminacy, will possess more vital appeal for them than do the intelligences and utilities.

The Feminist camp, further and further commandeering the intelligent and self-reliant, the worthy and purposeful of the sex, while more and more discarding the charms and the softness thereof, will be further and further deserted by men. And of the happy mean—the well-balanced woman, at once tender and intelligent, devoted and charming—there will be ever fewer available.

What then is the future, biological and sociological, of Races whose wives and mothers will have been drawn mainly from the shallow-brained and shallow-hearted, from the less dutiful, the less high and right-minded? To say nothing of the less constitutionally-sound, the Ultra-Feminine being, for the most part, a neurotic? The great majority of such will decline part, indeed, in functions so dull and distasteful as the mothering and rearing of children.

The Feminist wife, with her intelligent grip of economics and her stern sense of citizen-duty, would fulfil her racial function (in accordance with Malthusius) during intervals of more absorbing and strenuous activities. But when once the novelty—which gives a certain piquancy for some men to a mannishness some women are able to wear quite prettily and attractively in early youth—shall have worn away, the poor Feminist's chances of marriage will be few, indeed; save with men-weaklings, requiring the virile support of a strong-minded, muscular wife.

The Feminist makes a far more honest and reliable, sincere and helpful, mate than does the Ultra-Feminine. But men prefer the latter.

Male characteristics are to be found among their male acquaintance. And it is not a normal, nor is it a wholesome instinct in a man, to seek in sex the traits of his own.

In the cult of Mannishness, woman loses her strongest, her noblest and tenderest appeal for true men—the appeal of her womanhood. And losing it, she abandons the male to the toils of the enemy camp; to those whose womanishness partakes, at all events, of the attributes of a sex complementary and supplementary to his own.

* * * * *

Unhappy wights! How Nature has handicapped them—in order to spur them to their virile part of founding and providing for the family!

VI

As innocent of misappropriating that which is CÆsar's as they are ignorant of the biological verities, some Women-leaders and Prime-movers in Feminism exact and exult in the warm young, zealous adulation and hero-worship of their followers; never suspecting that such tribute is rendered, in fact, to the male in them. Both they and their votaries believe themselves loyal and thrall to their finger-tips to Woman and The Woman-Cause. Whereas they are, in reality, hero-worshipping, on the one hand, the Male in their Cult, and on the other, the Masculine traits of its female exponents. Against man himself and the Maleness that is his by natural right, many are filled with hottest distrust and aversion. Yet while sex-antagonism is thus strong in them in fealty to their creed, Nature is strong in them too. And with gentle irony she exacts their homage for the traits of the foe—masquerading in guise of a female!

Heroes to worship, every naturally-constituted woman craves. And it is the hero—far less than it is the heroine—in the Feminist leaders, their qualities of fight and masterfulness, of virile brain and concrete enterprise, which evoke their adherents' devotion and tribute.

Some Feminist leaders bid, indeed, as strenuously for and claim as jealously the undivided loyalty and subjection of their flock as ever Tyrant-Man demanded of the sex.

In schools and colleges too, the girls make gods and heroes of those of their sex who excel in manly sports. They have never a suspicion that their gods and heroes are not goddesses and heroines. Similars being unattractive to one another, the exposition of woman-traits leaves woman more or less unmoved. As Nature destined, the woman-heart goes out to those virtues and valours which are the natural complement of her own.

This latter-day vogue is not a normal, nor a pretty development. But it is another of the inevitable consequences of disturbing Nature's balances. Nature's plan and her methods of administration are so perfect that when left to herself she preserves her equilibrium and secures her aims by the safest and, at the same time, by the simplest expedients. When man destroys the hawks which, normally, reduce the smaller fry of birds to their allotted quotum in the Scheme of Things, however, the smaller fry multiply inordinately and devour his cherries and his corn. And when he destroys the smaller fry, the slugs and grubs and aphides multiply and devour his lettuces and roses.

So it is with Human traits and faculties. The balance of The Normal is the way alone of health and happiness and progress.

There is great boast now-a-days of friendship and comradeship between the sexes. Yet though friendship and comradeship are good allies of love, they are but sterile, uninspiring substitutes for the profounder, higher, vital and undying emotions of the true love-passion.

On the other hand, attachments between men and men, and between women and women, are strengthening and intensifying; absorbing the emotion and devotion formerly and normally bestowed on members of the opposite sex. While attraction between persons of opposite sex becomes ever lighter and triter in sentiment; serving more and more for brief distraction and provocative pastime rather than for a living and abiding bond.

This misplaced affection for members of the same sex arises from the attraction of traits of the opposite sex unduly developed in them. While indifference to members of the opposite sex results from lack in these of the characteristics of their sex, normally accentuated. Thus a woman is more drawn to one of her own sex possessing virile characteristics, physical or mental, than she is drawn to a weak-brained, emasculate man. Masculine women are attracted likewise by the womanly graces and quality of feminine women.

While men find in some members of their own sex, feminine traits of sympathy and sentiment absent in women of male-proclivity. All is an expression of the law of the Attraction of Opposites, which (normally) causes persons of opposite sex to be strongly drawn to one another.

On the other hand, the development in himself, or in herself, of the characteristics of the opposite sex makes members of either sex independent of and indifferent to members of the other, by supplying them with a spurious counterfeit of qualities it is natural to seek in those others.

VII

Professor Drummond, from whom I quote frequently, as being one of those biologists on the side of the angels, writes thus beautifully:

"Sex is a paradox; it is that which separates in order to unite.... There is no instance in Nature of Division of Labour being brought to such extreme specialisation. The two sexes were not only set apart to perform different halves of the same function, but each so entirely lost the power of performing the whole function that even with so great a thing at stake as the continuance of the species one could not discharge it.

"It is important to notice this absence of necessity for Sex having been created—the absence of any known necessity, from the merely physiological standpoint.

"Is it inconceivable that Nature should sometimes do things with an ulterior object, an ethical one, for instance? To no one with any acquaintance with Nature's ways, will it be possible to conceive of such a purpose as the sole purpose.

"Had Sex done nothing more than make an interesting world, the debt of Evolution to Reproduction had been incalculable.... What exactly Maleness is, and what Femaleness, has been one of the problems of the world. At least five hundred theories of their origin are already in the field, but the solution seems to have baffled every approach. Sex has remained almost to the present hour an ultimate mystery of creation....

"The contribution of each to the evolution of the human race is special and unique. To the man has been mainly assigned the fulfilment of the first great function—the Struggle for Life. Woman, whose higher contribution has not yet been named, is the chosen instrument for carrying on the Struggle for the Life of Others.

"That task, translated into one great word is Maternity—which is nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others transfigured, transferred to the moral sphere. Focused in a single human being, this function, as we rise in history, slowly begins to be accompanied by those heaven-born psychical states which transform the femaleness of the older order into the Motherhood of the New."

Out of the misconception of Sex as having no other purpose or significance than that of reproduction merely, there has arisen the further misconception that, lacking other purpose or significance, the sex-characteristics of Woman may be obliterated in her not only without injury, but with benefit to her; as being superfluous and hampering impedimenta merely, when reproductive issues are beside the question.

Yet since Faculty lapses first in its latest and highest developments, sex-deterioration manifests most in the higher mental and moral Sex-characteristics. One result, therefore, of not fostering, by culture and by avocation, sex-specialisations upon planes of mind and aptitude, is that, while lapsing in its higher functions, Sex remains operative still upon the physical plane, and functions crudely—perhaps viciously thereon. Just as intelligence becomes dense and degraded when its finer qualities are not exercised, and their development thus raised to finer issues. Moreover, by denying to Sex and to the rites of love any but parental issues, the individual, emotional and spiritual issues of the human union are ignored; a limitation all the more dishonouring, because of the present-day misconception of parenthood as being a purely "physical," and, accordingly, an inferior function.

There is not, of course, in all the complex marvel of human metabolism, such an anomaly as a purely physical function. Digestion even is far, indeed, from being such, since by way of this a slice of bread is transformed into living personality, living thought and impulse, living action.

Sex is manifestly a Spiritual and an Eternal Principle. Because, by way of its essential dual differentiations and intensifying operations, Matter becomes endued not only with Life and Faculty, but, having become Living Matter, it becomes endued, by power of reproduction, with the potential of eternal Life and Faculty. Even more, it becomes endued with the potential of the eternal unfoldment of ever-further intensifying Life and Faculty.

Sex is, in truth, for both genders, such a convergence of every characteristic—physical, mental and emotional—in a highly specialised focus, that the whole outlook upon life becomes highly specialised and intensified thereby; every impression and experience becoming instinct and charged with intrinsic meanings, vividness and colour. And this apart wholly from relation to the other sex. Although, of course, the focus and intensity of the traits of the one sex are accentuated in vividness and richness, in response to the complementary traits of the other.

It is Sex that energises men to be great; great leaders of men, great writers, great statesmen, great soldiers, great sailors, explorers—great sinners and great saints.

Sex it is makes women great also; great mates for great men, great mothers, writers, ministers to poor Humanity—great saints.

The mystery of Sex is, surely, Master-key to all the other mysteries of the Cosmos.

* * * * *

VIII

In aiming at Hermaphrodism, Feminism is contriving not only at frustration of all that Evolution has achieved in Life and Faculty, but it is making for the extinction of Life itself.

The Hermaphrodite is incapable of parenthood. And in the degree to which members of either sex lapse toward Neuterdom, in body or in mind, they become incapable of transmitting to offspring all those higher developments of form and faculty which are, essentially, Sex-differentiations. The present-day decline in parental impulse and affection, which shows, among other signs, in ever-decreasing Birth-rates, is a symptom of temperamental Neuterdom; evidence alike of Sex-decline, and, in this, of decline of that vital energy and spiritual impulse whereof Sex is the manifestation.

Such trend toward Race-suicide denotes, in the Race, that same neurasthenia and pusillanimity, which, in the individual, impel him to personal suicide.

Latter-day marriage, greedily grasping all that Life and Love bestow while grudging any due to Life and Love, is not true Marriage—but is sacrilege.

Between this and the mating of true men and women, who, in gratitude for Love, pay tribute joyfully to Life in lives to follow after them, is all the vital difference, in impulse and emotion, between the Ship of Love—with its mysterious freight—immured within a narrow lock whereof the gate to the Beyond is sealed, and the Ship of Love launched free upon the open sea of Human Destiny—a Shining sea of Faith and Hope, which tides beyond the narrow mortal gateway toward a Great Unknown; Remote, Illimitable, Veiled in Everlasting Silence.

This ship fares forth upon its voyage of Mystery, beatified by full surrender of all lesser issues to that sacred one of the Eternal Human—a surrender which endues true marriage with tenderness and awe and beauty.

* * * * *

Do we not pitch our songs too low, O sweet—my Singers?