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FEMINISM AND SEX-EXTINCTION

OLIVE SCHREINER'S GREAT BOOK

WOMAN & LABOUR

Large Crown 8vo. Cloth.

8s. 6d. net

"The feelings which are behind the various women's movements could not find clearer or more eloquent expression than they do in this remarkable book."

The Daily Mail.

"At last there has come the book which is destined to be the prophecy and the gospel of the whole awakening."

The Nation.

T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd., London.

FEMINISM AND
SEX-EXTINCTION
BY ARABELLA KENEALY

L.R.C.P. (Dublin)

"A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can
a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit."
"Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them."

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
1 ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1920

All rights reserved

FOREWORD

Feminism, the extremist—and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.

It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights, political and social, identical education and training, identical economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and public.

In Woman and Labour, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist objective: "We take all labour for our province." And this is the text of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.

Feminists anticipate—the militant faction with zest—fierce economic encounters between the sexes now that, War ended, our men, having fought their own and woman's battle in the trenches, are returning to reclaim their places in the world of work. Secure in that possession which is "nine-tenths of the law," and armed with their new powers of enfranchisement, it is further anticipated that the usurpers will be able triumphantly to stem the masculine reflux, and to retain, on all hands, their new industrial footing.

By showing that, contrary to Feminist doctrine, the division of Labour into two sexes, so to speak, is as natural and is as indispensable to Human Progress as is the division of Life into two sexes, the purpose of this book is to dissuade women from exploiting a world's misfortunes for their own immediate profit, and to reconcile them, in their profounder and more vital interests and in those of the Race, to surrender freely all the essentially masculine employments into which mischance has cast them.

Human evolution and progress have resulted absolutely from an opposite trend, in inherence and development, of the two sexes, as regards Life and characteristics, aptitude and avocation. The progressive differentiations and specialisations of vital processes and living forms, whereby human character and faculty have been increasingly advanced to higher powers, reach their most admirable culmination in the complex division of Humanity into two genders; each of which is enabled, by way of such complex specialisation, to promote, to intensify and to dignify its own allotted order of qualities. To oppose and frustrate this natural dispensation, whereby Human development is achieved by the two sexes travelling along diametrically opposite lines of Ascent, is to nullify all that civilisation has secured, and to transform the impulse of Progress into one of Decadence.

Nature, marvellously prescient in all her processes, has provided that the sexes, by being constituted wholly different in body, brain and bent, do not normally come into rivalry and antagonism in the fulfilment of their respective life-rôles. Their faculties and functions, being complementary and supplementary (and obviously best applied, therefore, in different departments of Life and of Labour), men and women are naturally dependent upon one another in every human relation; a dispensation which engenders reciprocal trust, affection and comradeship.

Feminist doctrine and practice menace these most excellent previsions and provisions of Nature by thrusting personal rivalries, economic competition and general conflict of interests between the sexes.

Should any reader find in these pages allusions and passages which, without biological or medical knowledge, may not be wholly clear to him, let him remember that these are addressed to such as have dipped more deeply into the subjects dealt with.

The main outlines and implications of the new Hypothesis presented here, of the origin and evolution of Sex, are all that he requires to grasp, in order to follow the argument of the book in its relation to Feminist methods.

Arabella Kenealy, L.R.C.P.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM

"The sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting which has its source in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children."—Spinoza.

I

There is no subject save that of Religion about which so much impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written as has been spoken and written round the Woman Question.

For more than half a century—since Mill wrote his famous Subjection, indeed—it has become an increasing vogue to regard Woman as a martyr; more or less sainted, more or less crushed and effaced beneath the iron-heeled tyrannies, personal, economic, and political, of the oppressor, Man. And it has been in the spirit of this conviction and in fervid endeavours—indignant and chivalrous on the part of the one sex, and still more indignant and but little less chivalrous on the part of the other—to liberate unhappy victims from a barbarous oppression, that most of the impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written, and doughty deeds done.

At the certain cost, therefore, of being stigmatised as a reactionary (severely qualified), I propose to unmask some of these which I believe to be baseless obsessions, and to present a wholly new—and, I hope, a more veracious and inspiring version of the case between the sexes.

To begin with, I assert boldly that the so-called Subjection of Woman, very far from having been a cruel injustice merely, on the part of man, has served, on the contrary, as a blessing and an inestimable benefit not only to herself but to the Race bound up in her. A blessing often rough and painful in its methods, during epochs when all other methods were both rough and painful, attended, too, by wrongs and cruelties; yet, in the main, operating vastly to her well-being and advancement and, in hers, to those of the Race.

Looking back upon the hard and bloody routes of Evolution whereby the human Races have attained to present-day developments, we see our forbears groping blindly, fighting blindly, advancing blindly; stumbling, falling, picking up again; making new departures only hopelessly to lose the road; making new departures, now to find it and trudge on. In all its painful and laborious phases, a terrible and sordid climb. Yet, nevertheless, in its great annals of Ascent, a noble and a wondrous March of Progress.

And whether we are Religionists or Evolutionists—or are sufficiently broad-minded to be both—the history of Life is seen to have been a history of deathless effort, never ceasing, never waning; renewed with every generation; intensified by every further acquisition of new power, as, with every further recognition of new goals and problems, the ever-increasing Purpose and the ever-increasing perplexity and complexity of The Purpose revealed itself at every step. It becomes increasingly clear, moreover, that Creation, or Creative Evolution (to employ Professor Bergson's phrase), has been the resultant of a progressive aggregation of Atomic Matter about some vast immanent Idea, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees materialising in the objective. Very much as bricks are grouped about the pre-conceived plan of a house, and could not be assembled in the building of the simplest tool-hut without predetermination of the site of every brick, and of the relation of every brick to every other.

And in all those past ages of conflict, bringing Order out of Chaos, Progress out of Order, and an ever-increasing domination of blind Energy and Inorganic Matter by Mind and Purpose, the fighting male it has been who, in his conquest of the Earth as in his conquest of other fighting males, both brute and human, has borne the greater heat and burden of the day. Women have striven also—toil has been the crux of their development as of their mates. But men have striven twofold. While women toiled in the security of homes, the sword, the blunderbuss or press-gang, or the equivalent of these, according to the epoch, awaited men and still await them at most street-corners of the arduous male career.

Women have suffered more, psychically; because this way lay their nature and their human lot. Men have suffered more, materially; because here lay theirs. And since advancement comes by suffering, women are reaping to-day the harvest of past travail of their sex, in the higher psychical development which now characterises that sex. During centuries when men were vastly too hard-pressed by the struggle for barest existence to have been aware that they possessed souls, women were privileged to be aware of theirs—by the affliction thereof.

The immediate purpose of this fencing of the women behind the stronger frames, the stronger wills, and stronger brains of fighting males was the Racial one, of course. While men battled with environment and with alien aggressors for their lives and for their food, as for those of the family, the sheltered women were alike the loom and cradle of the Race. As well, they made havens, or homes, for the fighters to return to for sleep and refreshment. They plied a simple, primitive agriculture, practised a primitive healing art, and otherwise evolved The Humanities. But since mortal power is limited, power expended in one direction is power withdrawn from some other. Power spent in battle is power lost to progress. The woman who, with the instinct for home and as shelter for her babes, laid the foundations of Architecture in a hut of mud, was enabled to do this solely by virtue of masculine protection.

It is in peace only that Progress arises, in leisure that The Arts evolve. And woman, walled in by the lives of the males, found leisure of body and mind to pluck flowers for the adorning of her hut, to shape platters of clay, and, later, even for embellishment of these with crude designs. Thus she was the first artist.

The fighting male was—by necessity—destructive. He invented a club. The female was—by privilege—constructive. She invented the needle (a fish-bone, doubtless). And while the male transmitted to offspring his virile fighting and destructive qualities, woman tempered and humanised these by incorporating with them her milder traits and artistries of peace. Lacking the male aggressive and protective faculties, however, increasing in skill and resource with his ever further Adaptation to (and of) environment, woman's gentler and humanising aptitudes would have had neither opportunity for evolution, nor scope for exercise and further sway.

II

I have been reading an account, by a naturalist, of some phases in the life-history of crabs. And it is interesting to find even among creatures so low in the Life-scale (although Darwin regarded these as the most intelligent of crustaceæ) that same instinct of protection of the female which is seen in the higher orders of creation.

A crab, being encased in an unyielding shell, is able to increase its growth only by "casting" its shell and developing one of larger size over its increased bulk. During the interval between casting an old shell and acquiring a new one, the crab in its soft, pulpy condition is readily injured, or falls prey to its natural enemies. To protect itself as well as may be, it shelters in rocky crevices or in other available hiding-places. This shell-casting occurs in both sexes, of course. But the circumstances under which the change is made differ widely in the sexes. For while the male-crab has no protector during his defenceless, shell-less state, his shell is cast a month or more earlier than occurs in the female; after which he feeds up, in order to be in superior fighting trim for her protection during her shell-casting phase. Fishermen describe him as then spreading himself over her as a hen covers her chicks, and in her defence desperately attacking all comers. The result of such protection of the female is that, although males are larger and fiercer, "hen-crabs" are numerous, while males are scarce.

The like is true of nearly every species. The males protect the females. Even the gorilla, savage and most terrible of beasts, lies at night on guard beneath the tree in which his mate and offspring sleep. If need arise, he fights to the death in their defence.

With regard to the chivalrous devotion of male-birds, Olive Schreiner thus comments in Woman and Labour (an example of that I have ventured to describe as the "impassioned fallacy" hurtling round the Woman Question): "Along the line of bird-life and among certain of its species, sex has attained its highest æsthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on earth ... represents the realisation of the highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity."

(This however, less, I fear, to accredit the male-sex with chivalry than to discredit the human male by ornithological comparison!)

* * * * *

One does not profess that such protective rôle of males—beast and bird and crab—is the outcome of sentiment. It is instinctive, subconscious. Nature's purpose being to preserve and to perpetuate species, she achieves this by safeguarding the female. The province of the male in reproduction is but slight and brief. It exacts so little from him as to interfere not at all with those other masculine activities which are the function of his sex.

Whereas, as Professor Lester Ward says, "Woman [and the female of all species] is the Race." Out of her blood and bone and vital powers she evolves and fashions it, nurtures and ministers to it.

III

For the preservation of species, two rôles are essential: the Male rôle of Combat, demanding strength and boldness, resource and fighting-quality, in order to protect and provide for the female and offspring; and the Female rôle of Devotion and Self-surrender, in order to nurture offspring ante-natally, and, after birth, to nurture and to tend its helplessness.

Now all but biologists, perhaps, take it as matter-of-course that Love had its origin in Sex.

Seeing love between the sexes as the strongest and most dominant of the civilised passions, it is natural to infer that it was born of the instinctive attraction between male and female, and that this instinctive attraction, with the growth and expansion of faculty, mental and temperamental, has evolved to the high and tender issues to be found in latter-day romantic passion; theme of poets, novelists, artists; richest and most exquisite of life's emotions; inspiration and motive of the finest human achievements. A passion which, for a space at least, transfigures the natures and ennobles the lives of all but the crass and the sordid.

Nevertheless—Love did not arise out of sex. The sex-relation in primal men and women held no element of affection; no sympathy, tenderness, self-sacrifice, or other attribute of Love. On the part of the female, it was compulsory surrender and the habit of surrender to superior strength, mitigated, doubtless, by a subconscious instinct to secure offspring. In the male, it was impulse as tyrannous and selfish as was the instinct to kill. Like the instinct to kill, a factor in it made for fitness for survival. There was in it, accordingly, an element of instinctive selection. But the selection made for survival-fitness merely in the mate. It owed nothing to sentimental appeal exercised by one female, and lacking in another. The instinct to mate was implanted by Nature for the continuation of species. If its observance contained an element of gratification, it held no more of reciprocity than did the gratification of that stronger lust, to kill, include a consideration of the feelings of the prey, or than greed of any other form of possession extends a grace of reciprocal benefit to the thing acquired.

Modern savages have no conception of sexual love. There are no love-songs, no courtship, no affection in their matings. The males marry mainly in order to secure wives to work for them. And they select strong women because these are best fitted for work. Or they select women who have some or another small possession. Biological instinct is a factor, doubtless, but it is not a factor of sentiment.

In his fine book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Professor Drummond says:

"Probably we have all taken for granted that husbands and wives have always loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted ... in the lower reaches of Human Nature, husband and wife do not love one another ... for the vast mass of mankind during the long ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all but unknown....

"The idea that the existence of sex accounts for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among early races has nothing to do with love. Among savage peoples, the phenomenon everywhere confronts us of wedded life without a grain of love. Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex-relation; it is not an outgrowth of passion. Love is love and has always been love, and has never been anything lower."

Even to-day, despite the evolution of the higher faculties, despite long centuries of inherited habit and tradition, and despite the circumstance that in all the nobler types of men and women the sex-instinct is spiritualised by affection and understanding—Even in this late day of civilisation, the male sex-instinct may be seen still in all its native tyranny and selfishness; seeking gratification in sensuality and cruelty, with callous disregard alike of the welfare as of the suffering of its victim. In the violation of women and children that occurs both in peace and in war, the instinct manifests as an impulse of aggression, and the sex-function as one of brutality or ruthless lust.

IV

Respecting the origin of Mind and Emotion, Charles Darwin said:

"In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself first originated."

And Huxley:

"I know nothing, and never hope to know anything of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected. The two things are on two utterly different platforms, the physical facts go along by themselves and the mental facts go along by themselves."

While Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (the biologist who was working out the theory of Natural Selection simultaneously with Darwin, both unaware that the other was working in the same direction) attributes to a Creative act of God, all the moral and intellectual qualities which have been super-added in man to those lesser and simpler ones he possesses in common with the higher animals. Wallace describes this as a "Divine Influx," and regards it as being wholly distinct and apart from the slow and gradual processes of Natural Selection.

But yet, in point of fact, what was it that inspired and energised the earlier processes, if not this same Divine Influx? The simpler processes must, from their earliest rudimentary beginnings, have been leading up to the later and more complex. And the later and more complex were, surely, continuous with the simpler—since Nature abhors miracles, and works by slow progressive biological sequences.

Nothing shows as more impersonal than a crystal; cold, hard, senseless, motionless. And yet in crystals is the element of Life, even the power of reproduction, showing factors of sex already operative in them. While living bodies, charged with warmth, mobility, sentience, intelligence, have Inorganic Matter for their basis of construction. And that Inorganic elements are very far from being the impersonal things they seem, but are linked by subtle correspondences to living Mind and vital powers, is shown by their effects on living processes and consciousness. Given as medicines, digestion (which is a species of rapid evolution from lower to higher forms of energy) develops such vital inherences within them as prove their apparent impersonality to contain a principle continuous not only with living processes, but with the highest mentality.

Professor Leduc observes in his illuminating book, "The Mechanism of Life," "the ordinary physical forces have, in fact, a power of organisation infinitely greater than has been hitherto supposed by the boldest imagination."

Coralline structures and beautiful shells, fungi, leaves, and plants bearing coloured, flowerlike blooms spring into growth when a formless fragment of calcium salt is dropped into a chemical solution. And these "Osmotic growths," artificially produced, possess far greater complexity of structure and of function than do the simpler living organisms of Nature.

The evidences of a Vast Stupendous Plan, which every further scientific discovery still further emphasises, are slowly forcing from our men of Science the confession that behind the marvellous phenomena their findings reveal, and which they are powerless to explain, must lie a Cause, occult and irresistible, an Impulse, all-pervading, incomprehensible.

Bergson describes an élan vital—a living impetus—determining such phenomena.

In his Presidential address to the British Association at Dublin, in 1908, Professor J. S. Haldane summed up as follows the position of Physiological Science: "The point now reached is that the conceptions of Physics and Chemistry are insufficient to enable us to understand physiological phenomena."

Weismann says: "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature, we must admit a Cause ... inconceivable in its nature, of which we can only say one thing with certainty, that it must be theological."

Drummond says: "Evolution is Advolution,—better, it is Revelation—the phenomenal expression of the Divine, the progressive realisation of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love."

If, then, we admit Life to be the product of a Divine Influx, whereby Inorganic Matter has been, by way of evolutionary processes, increasingly empowered to fructify in living form and faculty, Human Attributes are seen to be the flower of Spiritual seed, which, sown in Life, has germinated; has struck roots of biological function into living flesh and put forth leaves in living traits; has developed in physiological processes and blossomed in powers of Mind and of body. And as the stronger and deeper the grip of its roots in the earth, the taller and nobler the oak towers heavenward, so it must be with human characteristics. The deeper and more firmly the seedling faculties strike roots in living function, the fuller and more potent springs the impulse toward that evolutionary perfection which is the goal of Human Being.

If, however, living processes are the resultant of a Divine Influx, they are Spiritual processes. Life is then a manifestation in Matter, of Spirit. All the developments of Life are Spiritual phenomena, therefore. The imperfection and evil found in living creatures are not attributes of Life. They are crudities of rudimentary organisation, or are failures in or aberrations from the normal development of Life.

V

In the Evolution of Faculty, living traits are seen to have been all the while attaining to higher power by the differentiation and development of special organs to subserve their fuller function, their finer conscious apprehension, and their more complex manifestation on the material plane.

The brain has been specialised thus to serve as the organ of Consciousness; the eye, of Vision; the ear, of Hearing; the hand, of Touch and of manipulation. The lowest organisms possess no such specialised organs of sense or of consciousness. Nor are they equipped with special reproductive organs. They reproduce by cleavage; by budding a small portion of themselves, which, when separated, grows to a mature organism.

With other differentiations and specialisations of Function and Faculty, there has developed—for the all-important racial purpose of creating ever higher and more potent living species—the highly-complex human reproductive system, which, by its close and subtle nervous alliance with the brain, has become the medium and the instrument of a new and irresistible emotion. So that it serves not only for the perpetuation of a complex species, but, moreover, for the attraction, by natural affinity, of the mates best suited to one another.

And in course of evolutionary progress, the emotion of Love has been all the while more and more so leavening and inspiring sex-attraction with its purer and more tender attributes, that human passion has come to combine—in those of higher nature—the flame and energy of physical attraction with the tenderness and devotion of altruistic affection. With the result that human parenthood, thus quickened and spiritualised, has become ever further empowered to evolve more highly intelligised, more beautiful and more efficient types of offspring.

That Passion, pure and simple, has evolved out of the Male sex-instinct is certain. Even in its chivalrous development of romantic passion, are found, in transfigured form, that flame and urgence for possession which manifest crudely and cruelly in the primal male-instinct. Without this virile ardour, indeed, the sex-relation is but a poor and tepid, or a cold and sensual thing.

Yet Passion is not Love.

That meekness and forbearance, humility and self-surrender have been reared in the Female sex-instinct of submission to passion (primarily in aversion and fear more often than in acquiescence) is equally certain. And without these chastening factors to temper, soften and anneal, the sex-relation is a fierce and tyrannous concern. But no more than passion, is submission Love. Neither in passion nor in submission, pure and simple, is there joy of surrender or welding communion.

Nevertheless, since every human faculty must have its roots in living function, and every living function must possess some physical organ in which its processes occur, from what human function sprang the Love that is selfless, altruistic and pitiful; soul and inspiration of the most sacred emotions—self-sacrifice, charity, mercy, devotion, tenderness? In what nursery of Human Consciousness was this fair and gentle blossom sown; to spring, to develop, and to make for gracious growth?

Since, although it has come to lend its purity and sweetness to the Sex-passion, it neither sprang from nor has been reared in sex-instinct, is it a product of Parental Affection? Is it an evolution of the self-negation and the tenderness of parents for their children?

VI

Throughout Nature, the parental instinct is seen as a unique development, detached from and high above all other developments. Demanding, as it does, the complete surrender and self-denying labours of one individual in the interests of another, it differs from and traverses all other dictates. It impels a creature whose every instinct it had been—whose religion of biological survival it had been, indeed—to be wholly self-centred in its every aim and action, all at once to make another creature the focus of its interests and efforts. Where for a scratch, for a glance, the fierce female would have fallen tooth and nail upon another, now she surrenders meekly to the pangs of bringing offspring into life—and straightway licks and suckles the frail being that has riven her. Where she would furiously have driven off, or would have killed, another creature that approached her food, now she gives herself as food for this. Where lesser Fitness for survival on another's part had been signal for making such her prey, now Unfitness in the extremest degree claims her devotion and care.

Superfluous to cite cases of maternal altruism. The mildest and most timid among creatures becomes fierce and courageous in defence of her young. Style it "merely instinct," if you will. It is none the less heroic on the part of every individual that obeys it, and does not obey it blindly and mechanically merely, but employs all her poor wit and resource to suit her heroism to the special circumstance.

Without care and attention from the moment of its birth, the life of an infant would be reckoned in hours. The higher the organism, the more and for the longer period its infancy exacts unceasing devotion and nurture.

Fish and moth and other species of low order are cast off in the egg. Chicks scramble out of the shell.

The higher their grade in the scale of organisation and intelligence, the more helpless and incapable young creatures are to feed and to fend for themselves. Kittens are born blind and helpless, but after a few days they see and crawl about. The elephant-mother suckles and safeguards her baby-elephant for two whole years.

Now, were there no purpose in all this—Were it not that such devotion to offspring serves as impulse and spur to the evolution and development of faculty in parents, Nature, in planning the complex human species, would, surely, have endowed the human infant and child with fuller powers of self-preservation.

Were there other functions and aptitudes the exercise whereof would better stimulate and foster human progress, it is inconceivable that children would be, and would be for so long, the helpless, feckless, dependent mortals that they are.

For ten long lunar months, the human babe is part of its mother; homed in the nest of her body, warmed by her warmth, fed by her blood. She breathes for it, digests for it, assimilates for it, exercises for it. For ten further lunar months, it is dependent upon her for the food by which it lives. For nearly a year, save for an inept power of creeping, with but small sense of direction, it requires to be moved and carried everywhere. For years it must be washed, dressed, combed, laid down to sleep at night, got up in the morning, taken for rides or for walks, played with, bidden, chidden; comforted, warmed, cooled; defended, cherished, instructed—in a hundred ways to be gently and progressively adapted to life, by way of a more or less highly-specialised environment. Even when no longer helpless, it must be provided for in the matters of housing, food, clothing, education. It must be instructed in a means of livelihood, and started on its young career.

Among the poorer classes the child depends upon its hard-worked parents for a period varying between twelve and sixteen years. In the professional classes, the young son and daughter are not fully qualified for independent existence before the ages of twenty-three or twenty-five. In ill-health, in brain defect, and in other incapacities, parents must provide for their offspring for life.

And seeing how the demands of the young, and the response and exactions of the parents multiply and amplify proportionally with the higher evolution of both, we are forced to believe that the small survival-value of the child, owing to its native unadaptedness to environment, is part of The Plan, and that it subserves some high and complex purpose in human development.

VII

An essential obligation of Parenthood is, that, in order to fulfil this duly, the parents require to undergo a wholly new and intrinsic adjustment of faculty. Having arrived already at a complex adaptation to a complex civilised environment, in physique and character, in mentality and habit, now, by a revolutionary reversal of their human progress, they must re-adapt to the simplest of all creatures and conditions—a helpless, puling infant in a cradle.

Where they had had a whole world, perhaps, of intellectual interests and social pursuits to engage them, now they forgather beside a cot and—according as they are human or are not—lose themselves, brain and heart and soul, in the puling, impotent thing. They make themselves eyes and ears, arms and legs for it; carriage, chair and bed. They gaze, entranced, upon the marvel of the opening and shutting of its eyes. It yawns; they tremble lest it dislocate a jaw. It sneezes; now they shudder lest it may have taken cold. It gurgles, and they are transported to a seventh heaven.

Never has either been equally fluttered at their recognition by an exalted personage as both exult when flattered by the flicker of an eyelash that it distinguishes its father from its mother; or either from its nurse. Both perhaps are self-contained and philosophic beings, yet its cry distracts them; scatters their composure to the winds. The inept thing cannot even tell them what it wants. Its cry for food is much the same as is its cry when it requires to be laid down, or lifted up. When its milk is not sweet enough, its inarticulate fury is expressed in notes identical—so far as they can judge—with those of its impotent wrath when a pin-point pricks it.

But whatsoever the cause, to the winds the parental composure is scattered, as hither and thither they scurry, distraught, seeking a reason and a remedy. And this, of course, had been their tyrant's purpose. He had meant to strike panic in his parents' hearts. He was vexed or empty, or was otherwise uneasy. And behold the penalties of those who suffer him to be vexed or empty, or otherwise uneasy!

And whether they are rough, hard-working persons who have neither time nor taste for fuss and nonsense; whether they are the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Archbishop, Sir Isaac and Lady Newton, or the Emperor and Empress of Japan, it is all the same to Baby. No other uses have they in his absurd judgment than to obey his slightest gurgle.

And the wonder of the business is that they too—provided they be normal, wholesome-minded, natural-hearted persons—are of similar opinion. Even a Professor of Archæology must feel a twinge of some emotion when his first baby cuts its first tooth. King Lion himself suffers it with patience when his cub scratches his royal countenance, or gets its milk-teeth into his prize-bone.

The whole face of the earth is transformed by the Baby, indeed. And how much it is transformed for the better! It is not too much to say that it is humanised, redeemed. The most grudging of curmudgeons murmurs only a little to surrender his place at the fire to The Baby. The thirsty thief forbears to drink his infant's milk.

In his great story, The Luck of Roaring Camp, Bret Harte has shown, and has shown as probable, the uplifting and regenerating influence that "The Luck"—its mother a sinner, its father, Heaven alone knew who!—exercised upon a rough community of vicious men.

"It wrastled wi' my finger," says one in an awed whisper. To cover sentiment he adds, "the durn'd little cuss!" But carefully he segregates the member sanctified by the tiny, satin touch, from the other fingers of his wicked hand.

CHAPTER II

INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE SEX-CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE

"The most beautiful witness to the Evolution of Man is the Mind of a little child.... It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or Lucretius, that Maternity, bending over the hollowed cradle in the forest for a first smile of recognition from her babe, expressed the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a living witness to Ascent."—Professor Drummond.

I

Tracing the attribute of Love to its source in the parental function, it becomes clear that this function cannot be dismissed thus in a phrase.

There are two parents. And the parts played by these, respectively, not only differ widely in their nature, but they are signally disproportionate in their share of the labours involved. For while the male bears the brunt of the struggle with environment, for his own and for survival of his mate and offspring, upon the female falls the biological stress of pregnancy and lactation, and the material cares of upbringing.

The reproductive function of the male is but slight and cursory. With the female lies the tax of havening the embryo before birth, of nurturing it with her blood and substance, of suffering the drain it makes upon her vital energy, the burden of its weight; with, finally, the anguish and the dangers of delivery. And having come through all this, the subconscious and involuntary sacrifice is replaced by further—but now voluntary sacrifices. She not only continues to feed it with her living substance, but she employs brain and wit and bodily effort in tending, safeguarding and rearing it.

Meanwhile the sire—among the lower creatures, at all events—detaches himself with lordly indifference from any portion in these later, as he went free of the earlier obligations. He shares his prey with her and with their young. He defends them from the natural enemies of all. Sometimes he condescends to play for minutes with his cubs. But excepting among birds, the male parent takes little or no part in the upbringing of his family.

As with Love, so with Fatherhood, we take it as matter-of-course that this sprang and has evolved to present developments directly out of natural instinct. But as Love did not evolve out of the sex-instinct, neither did father-love evolve from a paternal instinct inherent in the lower animals and in primal man.

Of this, Professor Drummond says:

"The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no Fathers, ... while Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still wanders in the forest, a savage and unblessed soul.

"This time for him is not lost. In his own way he also is at school, and learning lessons which will one day be equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle; and these robuster elements—strength, courage, manliness, endurance, self-reliance—could only have been secured away from domestic cares.... The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem to attack.... If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent.... When we leave the Birds and pass on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile; and among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in case the father eats them."

In place of saying, therefore, that Love sprang in, and has developed from the exercise of the parental function, we must say that Love—in all its higher aspects—sprang and has developed in the maternal function.

But since every attribute, in order to be conscious and realised, is not only rooted but is reared in living function—out of what living function did Mother-love evolve? In the exercise of what vital processes has it been fostered and furthered?

In so far as these involve sacrifice of self in the interests of the child, the maternal ante-natal processes are processes of self-surrender. But these, when once incurred, are subconscious and involuntary. The prospective mother has no choice but to submit to physiological exactions.

And only a few women—those in whom maternal love is deep beyond the average—feel affection for their infants before birth.

Since love must have an object upon which to exercise its faculties and lavish its devotion, it is not, therefore, until the babe is in the mother's arms that the Love-attribute begins to function. And then the primal fount of all conscious and voluntary human selflessness and sacrifice springs afresh in the individual when, in yearning toward the helpless being in her arms, she wells with tenderness and gives herself to be its life.

In the altruistic tender yearning of the mother to her babe, whereat her blood transforms itself to milk, Human Love first sprang and functioned consciously.

This is my Body which is given for you.... This is my Blood ... which is shed for you.

Says Goethe, "There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation." He might have added "and on a great biological function." Every act of voluntary sacrifice, every impulse of compassion, mercy, tenderness, devotion, has had its inspiration and its source in this which is discredited by some as being a merely physical, and is despised, accordingly, as being an inferior process; this mystical transmutation of the mother's blood to milk, and the self-forgetting yearning wherein she yields herself as food for offspring. By the evolution, upon ever higher planes of consciousness, of this primarily instinctive sacrifice, not only Motherhood but Fatherhood too, and the Love-passion between the sexes have been fructified and purified, and uplifted down the ages. Other acts of devotion arise out of maternal ministry. But this is the intrinsic source of all.

Travelling up through all the rudimentary phases of development, simultaneously and side by side with the male fierce methods for the Survival of Fitness, there was evolving in the female, subconsciously and secretly, this sacramental impulse which was to inaugurate a new era—an era wherein charity and ruth were to be born as response to the claims of Unfitness.

The first woman who, of her free-will, gave her breast to her babe was the Mother of all the Humanities. She it was who prepared the way for the coming of Christ. By her, Love entered first into human consciousness.

And by countless generations of such willing tender sacrifice upon the part of mothers, human love has climbed out of the darkness of blind subconscious instinct into the Light of a great transfiguration.

It is weighty evidence of the evolutionary impulse inherent in the function of Lactation, that the development of this maternal trait engenders species so far higher in organisation and morale than those of creatures unequipped to suckle offspring, as to set the Mammalia in a class by themselves in the van of progressive advance. The higher organisation and morale of such result not only from the self-surrendering instinct in the mothers of species, but doubtless also from the superior nutrition promoted in the developing tissues of the young of species, by the highly-individualised food elements which are secreted by the maternal living cells.

The vital significance of this new potence in blood to transform itself to milk for sustenance of offspring is emphasised by the fact that the Mammalia are warm-blooded creatures. While that this new quickening of Life by the altruistic parental instinct originates in the female shows her as medium of that Divine Influx inspiring Creative Evolution, and evolving faculty by way of living function.

II

The question now arises: If Love and the higher affections had their origin in the maternal function, how happens it that man, in whom this capacity is absent, and who is devoid, moreover, of an inherent paternal instinct, has come, notwithstanding, to possess these higher affections?

One may answer off-hand, with the lightness of the tyro, that these have been transmitted to him by maternal inheritance.

But complex biological problems are not thus easily explained. Nature works by processes, not by implications. And the physical functions and the mental attributes of the sexes are so dissimilar, and have, with evolution, so diverged by ever further accentuation, that we must seek for definite biological processes by way of which the male has become endowed with, and whereby his primal characteristics have been transformed by the evolution in him of the maternal instinct—under guise of the wholly new and alien trait of Fatherhood.

A study of Evolution shows the differentiation and intensification of Sex-characteristics to have been the main feature in Human advance, and to have been progressively achieved by incalculable centuries of increasing differentiation and intensification of two opposite orders of impulse and faculty.

In savages and in all the less civilised races, the personal and temperamental differences between the sexes are but slight, and last for no longer than a few years of life. As with other faculties, Sex-differentiations become ever further intensified and more complexly defined as development rises in the scale. Man becomes more man. Woman, more woman. Most notable during the period over which the human organisation sustains its maximum of condition, these Sex-characteristics take longer to arrive at their perfection, and are longer and more fully sustained in the higher races and organisms than is the case with the lower. Then, with that degeneration of tissue which sets in with on-coming age, the old man becomes womanish, the old woman mannish.

It cannot be doubted that human perfection reaches its climax in the accentuation of the differences between the Sex-characteristics, physical and mental, of the one sex from those of the other. The best types of men differ far more from the best types of women than inferior men and women differ from one another. In body and in attribute, the sexes are complementary and supplementary. And their dissimilarities are the measure of their complementary and supplementary values.

Their attraction to one another, their interest and happiness in one anothers' company, are proportional to the degree in which members of one sex supply for members of the other, sentiment and qualities lacking in their own. Mannish women and womanish men are alike incapable of experiencing and inspiring the love-passion, which charms and transfigures life for true man and true woman. These unfortunate, imperfect neuter-persons, because of the deficiency in them of normal sex attributes and impulse, are shut out from the richest and sweetest, most sacred emotions of Humanity—precisely as persons of defective brain are debarred from the richer and fuller appreciations and joys of consciousness.

And yet, apart and distinct from, although at the root of this abnormal neuterdom, wherein the traits of one sex are so antagonised by those of the other that the finest powers of both are nullified—normally, all men possess latent in them the qualities of Woman; all women have latent in them the qualities of Man. Otherwise, this third Neuter-gender—mannish women and womanish men—could not have come into being.

In crises of life and under other abnormal conditions, the dormant characteristics of the one sex are seen to emerge in members of the other, and to become dominant. A woman, in the face of danger, develops the strength, the courage and the material resource of a man. A man, when put to it, reveals the gentleness, patience and psychical resource of a woman. And in neither is this substitution of alien traits imitative, merely. That it is vital and intrinsic is shown by the fact that not only mental characteristics, but the body itself becomes transformed. If the circumstances—exposure to danger, to hard and rough physical labours or to mental exactions which are the normal of the male—continue for long, woman's physique, equally with her attributes, becomes increasingly virile of mode.

A kindred metamorphosis occurs in men. When called upon to exercise for any length of time the functions of a woman, beside a sick bed, for example—or, to state it otherwise, when the male in him no longer receives the stimulus of the natural male rôle and activities—man's virile qualities decline. He becomes emasculate.

So too in disease. With the vital powers at low ebb, man's virility ebbs low. He grows soft and sensitive, uncontrolled and emotional, loses energy and initiative; lapses in outlook and temperament from the masculine normal. In abnormal states of physical development, men are puerile or womanish.

Women, as result of like abnormal undevelopment, or after operative removal of reproductive organs (propter quos est mulier) become mannish of type. In extreme cases the figure changes to a strong and sturdy maleness, the voice drops to gruffness; manners and speech become terse and abrupt, the jaw squares; even moustache or beard may develop. Such women lose, perhaps, every womanly characteristic; refinement of form, mental delicacy and sensitiveness, emotion, subtlety. They lapse to the biological grade, not of cultured, but of rough working men. In lesser degrees of sex-extinction, such as are seen in many of our modern girls, de-sexed by masculine training, the subjects are boyish merely; lean, active, restless, hipless, breastless, lacking all those fair, delicate artistries of face and form, as likewise the complex sensibility and emotionalism which are the higher characteristics of their sex.

III

These and other singularities of the phenomenon indicate that man has, so to speak, a woman concealed in him; woman has a man submerged in her. The case suggests the little Noah and his wife of the toy weatherglass. Under some conditions the man in woman emerges temporarily. Under some conditions the woman in man reveals herself. But the emergence in the one sex of the characteristics of the other, when appreciable and permanent, is abnormal and unpleasing, and is obviously degenerative.

Man is at his best when the woman in him is dominated by his natural virile traits. Woman is at her best when the man in her is sheathed within her native womanliness. This way, each is a highly evolved and a finely-specialised creation.

Nevertheless, such possession, in latency, of the qualities of the other, not only enhances for members of both sexes the potence of their own, inspiring and enriching these, but it engenders more perfect sympathy and understanding between them. The woman in man endues him with intuitive apprehension of the Woman-nature; of its needs and modes, its disabilities, its sufferings and aspirations. The man in woman informs her of the intrinsic values of his sterner calibre, and thus lends her patience with his impatiences, moves her tenderness and care for him in his rougher, more arduous lot, wins her admiration of his enterprises and ambitions. Moreover, the man in her strengthens and intelligises her mental fibre, stiffens and renders more stable and effective her more pliant will and softer, more delicate aptitudes.

While she, in her turn, endows him with her intrinsic mentalities.

Masculine intellection, pure and simple, is initiative, vigorous, enterprising; analytical, logical, critical; its outlook rational and concrete, its disposition just and honest. Capable in the degree of its virility, of strenuous and sustained endeavour, of keen concentration and close application; taking nothing for granted, but questioning and demanding proof of all things, it is an admirable executive agent of Mind. Per se, however, it is rational and deductive, judicial and judicious, rather than inspirational and creative. The blending with it of the Woman-faculty in him quickens his male brain by contributing the emotional element; endues it with intuitive sensibility, fructifies it with female creativeness.

Thus it blossoms in Imagination—a new talent, which his natural intellectual energy and executive ability enable him to raise to highest issues in Inductive Science and the creative Arts.

Sex, with its phenomena of the characteristics of both sexes blended but, nevertheless, distinctive in the totally dissimilar constitution of members of both, presents an enigma which all the thinkers of all the ages have left unsolved.

What is its significance—what its explanation? How has it been possible—without miracle, but by way of biological sequences of form and process, of function and faculty—for the divergent characteristics, physical and mental, of the two sexes to have developed in both, not only without either order of characteristics (normally) neutralising those of the other, but, on the contrary, with both orders ever further intensifying their differences in the sex to which they belong?

By hereditary transmission. True! But by what precise means? Because Nature achieves her results always by the continuous operation of unerring Law and intensifying processes, not by eccentricities or deviations. When she seems to us to skip at random, it means that we have missed some intermediate footprints linking her progressive sequences in a long unbroken train.

This problem of human duality, physical and psychical, has baffled not biologists only, but philosophers, religionists and seers. It fills both life and literature with puzzles, paradoxes, incongruities. It has been the source of perpetual misapprehension, misconception, maladministration, personal and ethical.

It lies at the root of the whole Woman question. It has supplied the motive—and has made the mischief of the Feminist propaganda and practice.

Because, in view of the masculine qualities latent in women, allied with the circumstance that masculine powers are those most profitable and effective on the plane alike of physics and of economics, it has seemed an inevitable conclusion that these dormant male potentialities were powers lying idle; virgin soil which, tilled and cultivated, would yield fruitful harvest. And this for the benefit not of woman solely, but of Humanity at large. Strangely enough, the converse proposition has not presented itself. A pity! For it might have brought enlightenment. Because it presents itself outright in the form of a patent absurdity.

Suppose a Man's Movement which should have had for aim the cult in males of their potential woman-qualities! Not for an instant could the project have found footing as being rational, its ends desirable, or as improving upon Nature. Everywhere is pity or contempt for the effeminate man. He is regarded as a poor creature, neither one thing nor the other; as little the peer of true man as he is notably an unworthy counterfeit of woman.

Yet how is this? Is it that we admit the male-sex to be so vastly and intrinsically superior to the female that we are not satisfied for half only, but demand that the whole human species shall be male? Nevertheless, since masculine qualities, although undeniably present, are normally latent in women, they must be inferior in power and calibre to these same qualities in men. Otherwise, in place of remaining in latency, they would assert themselves like men. Woman's inferior masculine powers, even when developed to the full, can equip her, therefore, to be no more than inferior male; "lesser man" merely, in place of being "diverse"—the highly-differentiated, finely-specialised being for which Nature would seem to have been shaping in her, during untold æons of progressive differentiation.

IV

The prevailing notion is that these masculine potentialities dormant in women are powers common to both sexes, which have been blighted in the one by long generations of educational and vocational disabilities precluding exercise and outlet for them. Or that they are powers which have been dwarfed by long "subjection" of the sex in maternal and domestic functions mainly.

Consulting Biology, we find that such artificial repression of Faculty in the mother (even were artificially-repressed faculty transmissible as such) could in no way have limited itself, in succeeding generations, to inheritance by daughters. On the contrary, the more we learn of the laws of Heredity, the more it is seen that Faculty descends from mother to son, rather than from mother to daughter. And yet, despite the sex-disabilities, personal and social, which are now condemned as having precluded the mothers of earlier eras from developing their masculine abilities, such mothers transmitted masculine characteristics in ever-increasing degree to successive generations of male offspring.

Whereupon another seeming paradox confronts us. Namely, that the sons of those earlier women, in whom masculine inherences were permitted to remain dormant, were notably more virile of body and mind than are the sons of latter-day emancipated mothers who have sedulously cultivated and have fully exercised their male proclivities.

And now upsprings a further momentous consideration: Is this cause and effect? Were the sons of women in whom the potential male had remained abeyant, more virile of body and brain than are the sons of women who have cultivated masculine characteristics, solely and absolutely because the mothers in the latter case had misappropriated to their own uses powers that belonged by right of heredity to sons? While those other mothers, by retaining such in latency, preserved them as a rich inheritance for male heirs. Is it similar, indeed, to the cases of a mother who realises and expends for her own purposes her sons' financial patrimony, and of a mother who, expending the interest alone thereof, retains the capital intact; and is enabled thus to pass it on as heritage? Is the power held latent in one generation the potential of the generation following?

It may be asked: Why should woman forgo possession and exercise of faculties available to her, in order to transmit these to sons? One might answer as in respect of that other patrimony. If it be true that she holds these powers in trust merely, they are not hers to spend. To expend them is to despoil her sons; to make paupers and bankrupts of them, humanly speaking. Further, since daughters inherit from the father, the male entail woman forbears to realise and to exploit for her own uses returns to her sex in the person of her grand-daughter—by paternal inheritance. For the able father is the parent of the able daughter.

Thus Nature works with the eternal justice of eternal reciprocity between the sexes; making them all the while more complexly diverse, but nevertheless more closely interdependent. So that one sex can neither progress nor can it regress by itself; but draws the other onward with it, or drags it back. Thus, the bread of human heritage consigned to the stream of posterity by one sex, for equipment and furtherance of the other, returns to the hand of the sex that consigned it.

If this be so—and I hope to prove it so—the woman who develops the potential male in her defrauds of its lawful racial and personal entail not only the opposite sex, in the person of her son, but she defrauds of its dower her own sex too, in the person of her grand-daughter.

Of the interesting and important biological processes underlying the mystery of the Dual-Sex constitution and its manifold phenomena, I am about to present a wholly new and—I venture to believe—a wholly true and convincing elucidation.

Natura simplex est, said Newton, et sibi semper consonans. (Nature is simple and always agrees with herself.) Bewilderingly multiple in her phenomena, she is superbly simple in her principles. By the operation of her one great Law of Gravitation, she sustains the mighty Solar systems—and brings the apple to the ground. By the extension, counterpoise and co-operation of one Primal Cosmic Energy—with its dual impulses, Centripetal and Centrifugal—she has generated all the diverse marvels of a Universe. And in view of her simplicity of Principle, it is conceivable that the Duality of Sex may be an extension into Life of that same principle of Duality which characterises the vaster Cosmic phenomena.

If this be true, Man and Woman are the complex resultant of infinitely many and varied evolutionary differentiations and associations of the two modes of Primal Energy. If so, the principle of Sex must have existed before Matter; must have been inherent in Creation before Creation began to evolve. And if so, Evolution would seem to have had for its purpose the ever further and fuller manifestation of these dual and contrary inherences in terms of Life and Sex. While, to judge by effects, it has had for its means such ever more intimate and intricate co-operations of these as have resulted in the progressively diverse and complex developments found to-day in Human Life and Human Sex-Characteristics.

CHAPTER III

THE MYSTERY OF SEX AND SEX-TRANSMISSION

"The idea that the female is naturally and really the superior sex seems incredible, and only the most liberal and emancipated minds, possessed of a large store of biological information, are capable of realising it."—Professor Lester Ward.

I

Those happy persons who do not perplex themselves concerning the intrinsic causes behind all physical phenomena see it as only "natural" that two parents of opposite sex should produce offspring of both sexes.

And yet it is not only a great mystery, but, on the face of it, it is an anomaly that a child who may possess an admixture of all the physical and mental characteristics of its two parents, bears, nevertheless, the sex and the sex-characteristics of one only. Sex, male or female, breeds true in nearly every case; the rare exceptions merely emphasising the rule. The mystery deepens when we realise that every individual is a product of countless such admixtures of the qualities, throughout countless generations, of countless forefathers and foremothers. And although such a man or woman may hark back to any one, or more, of the traits of his or her innumerable forbears, he or she, nevertheless, "breeds true" in the factors of sex and sex-characteristics.

Long and closely biologists have pondered these many and involved problems. How is it, they inquire, that an embryo bred of two parents of opposite sex develops the sex of one only of these? How is it that the mother, who belongs to one sex only, produces—and produces in about equal number—offspring of both? The phenomenon is expressed, biologically, in the term, "sex-limited factor"—an incalculable something in the embryo which limits its sex to the sex of one only of its parents. But the "something," and the method of this sex-limitation have remained enigmas.

Sex is regarded by the new Mendelian school of biologists as that which is known as a "Mendelian factor." And to follow the argument to its conclusions, a few simple words about the Mendelian theory of Heredity are essential to those unacquainted therewith.

* * * * *

About forty years ago, a German monk, Mendel by name, was struck by the facts that in his bed of edible peas certain plants grew tall, while others remained dwarf; that the blossoms of certain plants were white always, while those of others were always coloured. He made a number of experiments in crossing the plants, with a view to discovering the law of inheritance by way of its operation in hybrid varieties. Briefly, the results of his experiments—which have since been repeated and confirmed by many later observers—were as follows:

There are plants that are tall and can transmit only Tallness to offspring. There are plants that are dwarf and can transmit only Dwarfness to offspring. So too, there are plants of white blossom or of coloured blossom that can transmit, respectively, only White or Coloured blossoming to offspring.

When a Tall is crossed with a Dwarf plant, however, or a Coloured with a White plant, strange to say, the hybrid offspring of this cross shows one only of these opposite traits, to the exclusion of the other. No intermediate, or mixed, forms are produced.

Thus, a Tall crossed with a Dwarf produces only Talls. Plants of Coloured flower crossed with those of White flower give only Coloured flowering varieties. A yellow and a green-seeded cross produce only yellow-seeded plants.

In the cross between plants of opposite traits, one set of traits appears thus, exclusively, in the hybrid offspring. These traits—because they dominate growth and development—Mendel styled "Dominant." While those traits which are dominated by the other and opposite traits and do not appear in offspring, he styled "Recessive."

On further breeding, a new and stranger thing happens, however. Because when such hybrids—plants bred of parents that had borne, respectively, "Dominant" and "Recessive" characteristics, but with the parental Dominant traits so overpowering the Recessive traits of the other parent that these latter are submerged and concealed—When these hybrids are crossed with other hybrids like themselves, both the Dominant and the Recessive traits of the original parents reappear in offspring. The tall hybrids resulting from the cross between Tall and Dwarf plants, when crossed with other tall hybrids of similar origin, produce both Tall and Dwarf plants. So with Colour, and with the other so-called "Contrasted Traits."

It becomes evident, therefore, that although the Dominant traits of Tallness and Colour overpower in the growth and development of the second generation of plants, the Recessive traits of Dwarfness and Whiteness, these latter traits are submerged only, and are neither impaired in their values, nor destroyed. In the third generation, under different conditions of mating, the original Recessive, and submerged, traits re-appear, and reveal themselves in offspring-plants as the Dwarfness or the Whiteness that had characterised their grandparents.

Mendel assumed that such hybrid plants—offspring of a Dominant and of a Recessive parent—produce two varieties of sex-cells, or gametes, and that one order of cells contain the Dominant traits of the Dominant parent, while the other order contain the Recessive traits of the Recessive parent.

But any individual sex-cell, or gamete, cannot (according to his view) bear both Dominant and Recessive traits. The Dominant traits and the Recessive traits of the respective parents he regarded as being segregated, absolutely, in one or in the other set of sex-cells produced by hybrid varieties. And of these, the cells bearing Dominant traits are able to transmit Dominant traits only to offspring; while the cells bearing Recessive traits transmit Recessive traits only to offspring.

II

Now, Biology shows that plants and living creatures develop from a single microscopic cell, formed by the union of two half-cells, of which each half was contributed by one of the two parents.

Clearly then, a hybrid plant is one that has sprung from the union of two half-cells, one of which bore the Dominant traits of one parent, while the other bore the Recessive traits of the other parent. But because Dominant traits overpower Recessive traits in development, the cross between a tall plant and a dwarf plant produces tall offspring only—Tallness being a Dominant trait which overpowers the Recessive trait of Dwarfness. So too, the cross between a plant bearing coloured and a plant bearing white flowers produces offspring bearing coloured flowers only—Colour being Dominant over the Recessive Trait of Whiteness.

But because the Recessive traits of Dwarfness and of Whiteness were only overpowered in the plant-development, by the Dominant traits of Tallness and Colour, but were neither lost nor impaired in stock, hybrid plants that had shown only Dominant traits in growth and constitution, produce, nevertheless, two sorts of sex-cells for plant-reproduction: cells that bear the Recessive traits of the one parent, and cells that bear the Dominant traits of the other parent. So that in the fertilisation of one another by such hybrids, cells bearing Dominant traits mate with other cells bearing Dominant traits, and produce plants of pure Dominant type—Tall or Coloured, like one of the grandparents. While cells bearing Recessive traits mate with other cells bearing Recessive traits, and produce plants of pure Recessive type—Dwarf or White, like the other grandparent.

It is seen, therefore, that in plants, when a cell bearing Dominant traits mates with one bearing Recessive traits, the Dominant characteristics so overpower the Recessive that these latter lie latent, and concealed, in the resulting plant. But when a cell bearing Recessive traits mates with another cell bearing Recessive traits, the resulting plant (its growth and development not over-ridden now by the more assertive Dominant traits) is able to develop its Recessive characteristics.

* * * * *

These interesting and significant laws of plant-heredity and constitution, discovered by Mendel in peas, have since been found by many expert observers to hold true as regards other species of plants; as too in poultry, in mice, and in rabbits, and moreover, in the hereditary transmission of human characteristics.

In Heredity and Variation, Dr. Saleeby points out that in the mating of a black with a white rabbit, some of the offspring will be black like one parent, some white like the other, and some grey—a blend of the colours of both parents.

In the last case, the Dominant trait of Blackness, derived from one rabbit-parent, blends in the fur of the rabbit-offspring with the Recessive trait of Whiteness, derived from the other rabbit-parent; a grey rabbit resulting. But that the Contrasted Traits come to no more than a temporary and partial compromise during the life of such a rabbit-individual, without either of the traits losing its intrinsic characteristic—Blackness and Whiteness, respectively—is proved by the fact that these grey rabbit-offspring, on further breeding, produce not grey rabbits, but black rabbits and white rabbits; proving that the Black trait and the White trait in them remained distinct and segregated, neither altering its character in the least degree.

It is as though one should take a spoonful of black pepper and a spoonful of white salt, and thoroughly mix them. A drab "pepper-and-salt" mixture will result. But neither pepper nor salt will have changed its colour or its properties one iota. Could they be separated out again, each would be precisely as it had been before mixing. So it is with the Dominant and the Recessive traits in living organisms. They commingle intimately, but each retains its original and intrinsic quality.

All the diverse and beautiful varieties of vegetation and the loveliness of flowers, in form and colour, result from multiple associations in hybrid-plants, of those which are known as the "Contrasted Traits" of parent-stock.

III

The lay reader need not perplex himself with the problems and phenomena of Mendelism.

All he requires to remember are its three leading principles. Firstly, that in the world of Life, plant and animal, living attributes are divided into two contrasting orders. Secondly, that of these two orders of so-called "Contrasted Traits" ("Contrasting Traits" would be a fitter phrase), the two groups are as absolute and opposite in character and in significance as are the plus and the minus signs of Algebra, the Positive and the Negative potentials of Electricity, the conditions of Light and Darkness, of Blackness and Whiteness, of Heat and Cold. Thirdly, that the Dominant order of traits are paramount over and extinguish the Recessive order of traits.

To sustain her equilibrium by a counterpoise of dual and contrary factors, physical and vital, Nature must preserve these factors absolute and unchangeable as the constitution and the opposite attraction of The Poles. But in order to produce her countless progressive variations of form and attribute, physical and vital, she assembles these contrary factors in countless progressively complex combinations, co-operations and correlations.

It is conceivable, therefore, that the infinite gradations and variations of form and attribute found in the world of living creatures are, as in the world of plants, phenomena of the ever further differentiation and more complex combination, in the hybrid offspring of two parents, of two orders of Contrasting Traits, transmitted by the respective parents.

In all their multiple associations and diverse developments, however, the two Sets of Traits remain unchanged, precisely as do the individual elements of chemical combinations. Variations in species result, accordingly, not from change in the essential traits, but from changes in the modes and the degrees of the commingling of these in organisms; and in the modes and degrees of their ever more complex associations in such.

Tallness, being an impulse toward extension, can never be Dwarfness, which is an impulse toward contraction. Black can never be White. Square can never be Round. Yet two opposite traits, both influencing development, may come to a mean, or poise, in an individual organism; as is seen in the grey offspring of a black rabbit mated with a white rabbit. But it is a counterpoise merely of contrary factors. The traits of Blackness and Whiteness remain absolute and unalterable.

If now, the reader has grasped these leading principles of Plant-biology, he is in a position to follow the new application of them to Human Biology which I now venture to present.

Without going into details of physiology, it may be stated that the principles of reproduction are so identical in plants and living creatures as wholly to justify argument from one to the other. The only differences are in degrees of structural complexity as organisms rise higher in the scale of development, and demand, accordingly, more complex organs and functions for the more perfect manifestation of their characteristics; as also for the transmission of these to offspring. It may be repeated, however, that Mendelian law is found to hold good in humans, both in the hereditary transmission of normal characteristics and in the hereditary transmission of the abnormal traits of disease and degeneracy.

Increasing complexities, structural and functional, are indispensable to the presentment of the attributes of the higher species, Man. But such complexities are, nevertheless, continuous with and have sprung out of the simplicities of lower and rudimentary organisms, precisely as the branches and leaves and flowers of a plant are continuous with and have sprung out of its roots. A vital and important biological detail (to be considered later) is that plants are not, as living creatures are, differentiated into a right and a left-side, identical in construction. Another is that plants are self-fertilising.

With the lower animals, plural births are the rule. And in these, the still crude and imperfect differentiations of the Contrasting Traits allow of piebald and other modes of chequered colour and amorphous construction.

The higher the organism, the more complex are the biological requirements for its pre-natal development, as for its post-natal nurture. The functions of Parenthood, both physiological and psychological, are always evolving to higher and more complex issues, therefore, as the species to be reproduced and nurtured becomes more complex. In human births, single offspring is the normal. Twin births are comparatively rare. And that these are abnormal is shown by twins being below the average always in health or in faculty; usually in both.

IV

As already mentioned, Sex is regarded by the large and ever-increasing order of the adherents of Mendel as a "Mendelian factor." But in applying Mendelian truth to humans, I venture to think the applications have not been carried to their ultimate and most momentous conclusions.

Because, given the keynote to the Principle of Duality in the phenomenon of the Contrasting Traits found manifesting in plant-heredity and constitution, the duality of the Human Sexes, with their respective orders of Contrasting characteristics, suggests itself as being analogous.

Human attributes, physical and mental, are seen, like those of plants, to group themselves into two distinct categories, the Male and the Female sex-characteristics, primary and secondary. And these, though wholly contrary in nature and in trend, are found—precisely as occurs in plants—linked together in the hybrid offspring of the two parents from whom they were, respectively, derived; blending in a temporal unity, but remaining, nevertheless, unchanged in their essential differences; coming to means and counterpoises in individual organisations, yet nevertheless preserved distinct and unalloyed in these, as is shown by their emergence, unaltered, in offspring of opposite sexes.

As a hybrid plant is the product of two parents characterised by opposite traits—Tallness and Dwarfness, for example—so, I submit, a human creature is the hybrid offspring of two parents characterised by opposite traits—Maleness and Femaleness, with the Sex-traits differentiating one sex from the other.

And at once a solution of the many baffling presentments and problems of Sex presents itself—of the enigma of man with Woman potential in him, of woman with Man potential in her; a key to the mysterious Duality of human biology and psychology, with its conflict of battling impulses, its harmonies of blending attributes, its innumerable and diverse developments in proportions, in means, in extremes; in normalities, eccentricities, deviations and reversions. And the analogy between the two orders of Traits—in Plant-life at the lower end of the scale of species, and in Human life and psychology at the higher end—suggests that the ever-increasing complexity of organisation and faculty which has characterised Evolutionary Progress, has had for aim, as it has had for method, the ever further differentiation and more perfect segregation, but, nevertheless, the ever closer and more intricate association of the contrary factors of Maleness and Femaleness.

In the lower organisms—plant and animal—the two groups of Traits are but crudely differentiated as characteristics distinguishing one sex from the other. In such lower organisms, Sex-development is merely rudimentary; the first foreshadowings in Life of two intrinsic orders of Essential Attribute, the progressive evolution whereof reveals two contrary trends in physiological and psychical inherences.

Like Light and Darkness, Heat and Cold, Sex is a phenomenon of Dual states which manifest by way of relativity. Without Maleness, Femaleness has no significance—no existence, in fact. And the converse. And in the lower and rudimentary forms of existence, in proportion to their degrees of undevelopment, the dual states of Sex are but faintly defined. The very lowly forms are bi-sexual and self-fertilising. While the first and simplest mode of reproduction is by cell-division merely; the principle of Sex, with its dual factors, functioning, but not yet differentiated into dual forms.

The evolution of Species and the evolution of Sex have been so absolutely co-incident in biological progress, indeed, that we are forced to perceive them as cause and effect; or, rather, as one and the same thing. And the evolution of Sex has meant, of course, the ever further divergence and the more complex specialisation, in form and in function, of the characteristics of the one sex from those of the other.

V

On still closer consideration, it appears, moreover, that the evolution of Sex has meant pre-eminently the evolution of the female sex—the slow and gradual emergence and development, in species, of female characteristics, as, in course of Evolution, these have freed themselves and have risen ever further into evidence from long subjection by the stronger, fiercer, more assertive—in a word, the Dominant—traits of the male.

(A conclusion as singularly interesting, I think, as it is instructive, in view of modern Feminist doctrine and aims, which make, not for the culture and the ever further evolutionary development of the Woman-traits in woman, but, on the contrary, for a reversion to earlier cruder states of the subjection in her of her Woman-traits by those male Dominant ones, which, as the hybrid offspring of a male and of a female parent, every female creature inherits from her father, together with the Woman-traits she inherits from her mother. There is seen here the irony that woman has, by long ages of biological development, released herself from sociological subjection by the male, only voluntarily to set the Woman in herself in far worse psychological subjection to the male in herself.)

In the new and profoundly interesting light thrown by Mendel on some previously unsolved problems of heredity, the reason for the long subjection of woman, biological and sociological, becomes clear.

Because, given the key-notes of Tallness and Colour as Dominant traits, one identifies these, at once, as traits of Maleness; the greater stature of male creatures and the richer colour of their fur and plumage in the lower species pointing unmistakably thereto. Dwarfness (or lesser stature) and Whiteness (or lesser colour) are Recessive, and are obviously Female traits. The plant of Dominant type, though still bi-sexual, is making for a male genus; the Recessive type is making for a Female genus. White creatures are so feminine in general effect that it seems an anomaly when they are males. The converse is true of black creatures. The black horse is stubborn and restive; the white, gentle and submissive.

White poultry are prolific in egg-production; white cattle are good milkers—a female characteristic. Jersey cows are both small in size and pale of colour.

The male sex stands presumably for Dominance. And his positive, or objective, traits overpowering the negative, or subjective, traits of Recessiveness, prevail accordingly in early biological development.

The female sex stands for Recessiveness. Her less assertive traits yield and recede into the background before those of the Dominant male. In stature, in strength, and in colour, and in the allied mental attributes, he holds the foreground in form and in function. The reason being that his rôle in Life is adaptation to environment.

The male, therefore, in his masculine rôle of Adaptation, with his Dominant traits making fiercely for the survival and for the ever further development of physical fitness—until physical fitness, or Adaptation, had attained due degrees of ascendancy—was long lord of Creation; the female, his vassal. And this not only in life and in action, but too in the personal characteristics of both sexes. During æons before the Recessive female-traits were able to come into evidence as definite traits, they functioned as negations, merely; submerged and over-ridden in all female creatures by the Dominant male-traits they had inherited from their sires.

Primal physical development may be said, thus, to have derived its first impulse from those fierce and fighting male-proclivities which characterised it in the epoch of that early savage struggle with environment whence Species emerged. Only with further evolutionary progress, do the female traits manifest as personal characteristics, secure survival, and find increasing exercise and sway.

The tigress is only less fierce, less strong, and less savage than the tiger. Primal woman was only less fierce, less strong, and less savage than the male. It is only, indeed, in the maternal function and relation that the female traits of both tigress and primal woman awake, and find justification, impulse, and scope for development. And while the material progress which has led to modern Civilisation resulted from Adaptation to, and of, environment, and derived its impulse from the male proclivities of strength, assertiveness and intelligence, the moral progress thereof may be said to have derived its impulse from the evolution of the female sex-characteristics. Because the evolution of Woman-traits has meant the ever further tempering and counterpoising of the fiercely active and aggressive male propensities, by the more passive and self-surrendering qualities of the female.

Judging the respective characteristics of the sexes by their widely-differing rôles in the most important of their co-operative living functions, the parental one—the sole function wherein the sexes of lower organisation co-operate, indeed—the respective attributes of Dominance and Recessiveness manifest clearly in these. The province of the male being to fight for mate and young, providing food, defending life—in order to fit him for this struggle for racial survival, his traits of strength and stature remain long paramount, alike in development and function, over those of the female, as regards his own organisation and that of his offspring, both male and female. The province of the female being to surrender her powers to the nurture of offspring before birth, and, after birth, mildly to suckle and to tend its helplessness, Nature equips her to these ends; inhibiting, or negativing, strength and fierceness in her by the traits of Recessiveness.

Tigress or savage woman, her struggle with the rough conditions of primal existence is only less fierce and less strenuous than her mate's. It demands the positive male-qualities (which manifest first in stature, strength and pugnacity) only less in degree than does his, therefore. The negative female qualities which, manifesting first in passivity and surrender, detract from her fierceness and activity, would have made for extinction of species had they not been defended by those of her fighting mate, as too by the male-traits she herself had inherited from her fighting father. They could only evolve, accordingly, precisely in proportion as they were sheltered behind the male dominant powers. The tiger shelters his tigress only during her maternal phases, however. Her cubs brought forth, suckled, reared, and thrust into the jungle to fend for themselves, she must fight her own battles for food and existence. And her brief maternal phases being all too short for more than the scantest development of female traits—which derive their fullest impulse in their exercise as mother-traits—she remains a tigress merely, and produces tiger offspring merely, because only tigerishness secures survival in her domain of life and attribute.

With the further advance of progressing species, savage woman has evolved from savage brute to savage woman by way of such increasing shelter and protection by her Dominant mate as have permitted the slow and gradual evolution of the Recessive Woman-traits in her; and thereby the evolution of the Woman-sex. Her maternal phases and the unfitnesses of these become ever more prolonged and incapacitating; her offspring demands ever longer periods of suckling, devotion and care, as both she and it rise higher in the scale of organisation. Thus, Sex has evolved in the male by response to the ever-increasing claims upon him, by the female and by offspring, of his traits of protective chivalry and intelligent effort. And Sex has evolved in the female by response to the ever-increasing claims by offspring upon her, of her traits of devotion and ministry.

The evolution of the Woman-attributes has been rendered possible only by that protection accorded by the male to the female as the due of her maternal unfitnesses; securing thus for her and for offspring a more privileged and kindlier environment. Environment which, evoking less of fight and physical stress, enabled her inherent milder, self-surrendering Recessive traits to emerge, to unfold, and to function increasingly in life and heredity.

And in the degree of her advancing evolution, the male evolved. Because, just as in her earlier hybrid constitution, the Dominant male-traits she had inherited from her father, submerging the Recessive female-traits she had inherited from her mother, made her, for long æons, more male than she was female, so now, with their progressive evolution, the Recessive female-traits not only made her ever more woman, but, transmitted in ever fuller measure to her sons, increasingly tempered, modified and humanised, the masculine fierceness and combativeness of these. Whereby were substituted arts of peace and civilisation for those of war.

Thus, with advancing Evolution, the female sex-characteristics have engendered, in both sexes, qualities of quietism and subordination, to temper those of force and aggression; amenities of gentleness, forbearance and affection, to soften assertiveness, turn the edge of strife, and fructify intelligence. Thus, human civilisation has been fostered and furthered.

In the hybrid creature that every man and woman is, are grouped two sets of Contrasting Traits, or Sex-characteristics: traits Dominant, or male, and traits Recessive, or female. And in the complex human hybrid, these traits, ever increasing in complexity of constitution and further diverging in trend, are associated in ever more close and complex poise and counterpoise as both become more intensified and intelligised.

Man is a hybrid in whom the male Dominant traits derived from his father prevail in impulse and development over the female Recessive traits derived from his mother. Woman is a hybrid in whom the maternal Recessive traits prevail in impulse and development over the male Dominant traits she has inherited from her father.

The Woman-traits (which, as said, reach their highest culmination in mother-traits), become in man paternal traits; modified mother-instincts which move him not only to love, in addition to providing for and protecting offspring, but, transfiguring all his other characteristics, move him to philanthropy, amity, tolerance and altruism in his dealings with his fellow-creatures.

CHAPTER IV

ONE SIDE OF BODY IS MALE, THE OTHER SIDE IS FEMALE

"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,

Your heart anticipate my heart,

You must be just before, in fine,

See and make me see, for your part,

New depths of the Divine!"

Robert Browning.

I

On further applying the Principle of Duality, as operating in organisation and heredity, strangely interesting and significant developments appear.

Because, with the ever further evolution of Form and Faculty as organisms have risen higher in the scale of life, the bodies of living creatures are seen to have become further differentiated into two sides; a right and a left. Anatomically, these two sides appear identical in structure and in function, although contrary in incidence to one another. Each is incomplete and impotent without the other. Nevertheless, paralysis and other diseases show that each is, as it were, an entity totally distinct from the other. One side may be wholly helpless and insensitive while its fellow remains sound and efficient.

Complementary and supplementary each to the other, both are, in a sense, complete. Further and closer comparison of function shows, however, that although they co-operate in action, they are by no means identical in power or aptitude.

The right half of the body is, for both sexes, the active and executive half; quicker and stronger, and in all ways more efficient on the plane of physics.

The left half is, relatively, passive and inert, is responsive, mainly, to the initiative and requirements of the right half, by which its powers are overshadowed in every form of direct activity.

As with the two sides of the body, so it is with the two halves of the brain, which are at the same time the agencies of mentality and the centres for recording the sensations and for directing the movements of the two sides of the body. The brain-half which controls the right side is known as "the Leading half." It is the agent in concrete intellection, as in physical activity.

While, so far as biologists and psychologists have been able to discover, the other half of the brain is negative in function—a blank, as regards concrete intelligence and nervous or muscular initiative. In disease, it has sometimes been found to undertake, and to perform feebly and imperfectly, sundry of the duties of its active "Leading" partner. But inert and inadequate in muscular action, it is negative in intellection. It has been observed, however, that patients in whom this brain-half is diseased show signs of moral deterioration. Yet whatsoever its functions—and the fact that it does not atrophy nor degenerate in the marvellous structure and complexity which characterise brain-constitution shows that it functions duly—its operations are totally dissimilar to, and are, moreover, wholly overshadowed by those of its active, intelligent partner.

Here again, as in the two sides of the body, appear, surely, the factors of Dominance and Recessiveness—in other words of Maleness and Femaleness; of strength and activity upon material planes, and of inhibition upon these.

Developments which, being in full agreement with one another and with others, suggest that the two orders of Sex-characteristics (derived from parents of opposite sex) are centred, respectively, in the two sides of the body, and in the two brain-hemispheres allied, respectively, with these. One side of the body, with its allied brain-half, represents the paternal inherences of the individual; the other, the maternal. If so, the right side of the body, with its allied Leading, or Dominant, brain-half is, clearly, of male inherence. While the left side, with its allied Recessive, or Dormant, brain-half is of female inherence.

The inference is further supported by the fact that the stronger right side is rather larger and more masculine in form; while left-side limbs are in normal right-handed persons, more slender and shapely and delicate—in a word more womanly—than are those of the right.

As regards the face, from one aspect both sides are complete, from another aspect both are incomplete, without the other. And in configuration and expression, the two sides of the face differ appreciably; the left side being more psychical, emotional and subtle—in a word again more womanly.

In most persons, the hands and ears and eyes of one side differ from those of the other, both in form and in function. In some persons the differences are considerable. It happens occasionally, indeed, that the eye of one side resembles in colour the eyes of one parent, while the opposite eye bears the colour of those of the other parent.

Strange to say, there are, moreover, in the human male, organs concerned with the strictly female function of lactation.

Indication of primæval human hermaphrodites formed one of Darwin's greatest puzzles, indeed. In his Descent of Man, the following passage occurs:

"It has been known that in the vertebrate Kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various accessory parts appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong to the other sex.... Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite, or androgynous."

It escaped him as it has escaped later biologists that Man, the highest of the vertebrates, is still androgynous. And this inevitably so, since, being of bi-sexual parentage, the sex-characteristics of both parents must be present in him.

In The Evolution of Sex, Professors Geddes and Thomson state:

"Sometimes a fish is male on one side, female on the other, or male anteriorly and female posteriorly.... Among invertebrates the same has been occasionally observed, especially among butterflies, where striking differences in the colouring of the wings on the two sides have in some cases been found to correspond to an internal co-existence of ovary and testes.... The prettiest cases of superficial hermaphrodism occur among insects, especially among moths and butterflies, where it often happens that the wings on one side are those of the male, on the other, those of the female."

II

Despite the fact that Nature has evolved the complex human races from the single-celled microscopic amœba ("Protoplasmic father of Man," as science has styled this), there are those who regard it as another of numerous blunders on the part of the Great Mother that the left side of the body is a more or less passive and powerless member. Accordingly, the doctrine of Ambidextry has arisen. With the result that its wiser exponents have abandoned it. Because it has been found that children trained on Ambidextrous lines develop neurotic symptoms. This occurs even in cases in which children naturally left-handed are taught to use the right hand, as is normal.

In a lecture given before The Child-Study Society in London, Mr. P. B. Ballard, London County-Council Inspector of Schools, stated that left-handed bowlers send down the ugliest balls, left-handed boxers deal the most unexpected blows—blows that hurt terribly. To be left-handed, it seemed, was to be not merely awkward, but to be wicked, moreover. Yet any attempt to interfere with a child's natural habit is liable to make him stammer. (The evil bent of left-handed persons has a special significance in view of my hypothesis of the dissimilar mental functions of the two brain-hemispheres. The term "sinister" expresses this bent. The inference is that in such transposition of the normal functions of the brain-halves, the tempering and humanising influence of the Woman-half is counteracted.)

Of a group of 545 left-handed children, 1 per cent. of pure left-handers stammered, against 4·3 per cent, of 399, in course of being taught to use the right hand, Mr. Ballard further stated. In another group of 207, the figures were 4·2 per cent, and 21·8 per cent. respectively. Six out of ten left-handed children who had been taught to use the right hand were practically cured of stammering after having been allowed to use the left hand exclusively for eighteen months. There are twice as many left-handed boys as left-handed girls; and stammering is twice as prevalent among boys.

All of which indicates normal differences in function of the two sides of the body—differences suggesting that, as I have surmised, each is the site and the agency of a principle totally unlike that of the other.

III

Upon referring to Biology—on the processes whereof every development, both physical and psychical, of living creatures rests—this curious dual constitution of the body, together with the problems of dual sex-transmission and inherency, become explicable.

And the solutions are at the same time so simple and inevitable as to be the strongest possible confirmation of my thesis.

As already stated, living organisms, offspring of two parents, derive half the source of their structure from one parent, half from the other.

All plants and living creatures evolve their organisation from a single microscopic cell, precisely as Life itself evolved primarily, and has developed out of the single-celled, microscopic amœba. The microscopic cell which develops into a living creature is composed thus of two halves, or "gametes," to employ the scientific term. One half was contributed by the father: the other, by the mother. The two have united to form a whole cell. From such a cell (zygote), half male, half female, the body of every living organism has sprung.

Now, although these two half-cells unite to form a whole cell, exchange constituents, and appear to lose their identity each in the other, it is, in the face of the strange dual constitution of the body, difficult to doubt that each half actually retains its identity and sex-inherences, and develops along its own lines (albeit in close correlation with the other), throughout all the marvellous, intricate, and complex processes of embryological existence, during which the zygote is evolving into a living creature, capable of separate and individual life. And the inherences of these two halves are represented, at birth, in the respective sides of the body; each being, as it were, a complete and perfect entity, although inseparably knit in one flesh to its twin. And throughout all the further intricate and complex processes whereby the creature comes to maturity, lives, reproduces its species, and dies, each half preserves its individual inherence alike in constitution and in function. And yet in the mystical unity of their commingling duality, they are one flesh.

Each of the parental half-cells contained, marvellously, the potential moiety of a living personality. But either, alone, would have been but an incomplete and valueless thing, had it not become united with the complementary half-cell required to complete it structurally, and to engender and energise its potentialities. Nevertheless, throughout all the immature and the mature phases of life, from conception to birth, and from birth onward to death, the opposite sides of the body represent normally the opposite sex-inherences of their respective parents. They are, in humans, the Man and the Woman—two in one—that exist in every living man and woman. They represent contrary principles; they perform different functions; they engender and energise dissimilar processes. One is the centre of the Male characteristics, Dominant upon the material plane; the other, of the Female characteristics, Recessive thereon.

Normality and health are the mean and balance, in the individual, of the complementary and supplementary functions and processes of the opposite sex-inherences of his, or her, body. Precisely as in the social economy the complementary and supplementary rôles of men and women counterpoise the aptitudes and determine the effectiveness of human life and action.

The left, Female-half of the body, with its allied half-brain,[1] is inhibitive, and engenders the evolution and the preservation, physical and mental, of The Type; sustaining health and vital power by way of the female attributes of rest and conservation.

The right, Male half, with its allied half-brain, is executive, and energises the development (Adaptation) of The Type in its relation to Environment, and, disbursing and applying the vital resources, generates and differentiates potential faculty in terms of living function.

IV

This hypothesis of the dual constitution and of dual functions of the two-sided body supplies an explanation, equally simple and inevitable, of the parental transmission of Sex. Natura simplex est, said Newton. And Du Prel, "Nature is much more simple than we have any conception of."

Because, as Biology shows, not only does each of the two parents contribute to offspring, but there being both a right and a left reproductive gland in members of both sexes, the contribution either parent supplies must have been derived from one or other of these glands in them. And if the two sides of the body are of different sex-inherence, it is only logical to conclude that the contribution the gland of one side makes will be of different sex-inherence from that of the other.

Since all forms of Energy have two modes, potential (or latent) and kinetic (or active), on the plane of physics, this must be true, of course, of Vital Energy.

Life-energy must be present in all living bodies in the forms, respectively, of latent Vital Energy and functioning Vital Energy—energy conserved and available for functioning, and energy expending itself in the living processes of mentality and action.

An individual is able to move his limbs by power of the potential motion stored, or latent, in the muscle-cells of his limbs. Just as a locomotive-engine is enabled to travel by power of the potential motion stored in the steam generated in its boiler. And as in the living organism, so in the engine, the mechanism and the processes that engender in it the potential motion of steam are wholly distinct from those which convert this potential motion into actual motion.

One is able to think, by power of the potential mentality stored, or latent, in his brain-cells. For not only the vital processes which sustain the life of the organism, as those too which enable it to function in terms of living personality and action, but brain-power also must exist in the dual forms, respectively, of potential Faculty and functioning Faculty. So too, Reproductive power. In all of these appear again the modes of Dominance and Recessiveness, of powers positive and manifesting, and of powers negative and latent. And since the female sex is characterised by traits of repose and conservation, and the male sex by traits of action, the dual modes of vital, muscular, cerebral and reproductive energy in potential, and of vital, muscular, cerebral and reproductive energy in course of generating function, range themselves inevitably on the two sides of the living equation as Sex-characteristics differentiating the male organisation from that of the female. Thus ranged, they characterise the two sides of the body as representing, respectively, a right, male side which is the central agency in function, and a left, female side, which is the reservoir of the potential of function.

If then the female mode of functioning is the Potential, or Recessive, a mode of latency, it is to be inferred that the male traits every female creature inherits from her father will, when incorporated in a body of female prepotence, pass into the potential, or Recessive, mode; and will thus become inhibited from developing as male-characteristics. Nevertheless, this male potential will be preserved in that reproductive gland which represents the paternal inherences in her, and will be transmitted, as her contribution to male offspring, in the sex-cells generated by this gland.

While the female inherences every male derives from his mother will, in the presence of the Dominant male-characteristics he derives from his father, retain their latent, or Recessive, mode; and will thus not emerge as female characteristics. The female inherences will be preserved, however, in that reproductive gland which represents the maternal inherences in him; and will be transmitted as his contribution to female offspring.

It will be seen thus that, as in hybrid plants, so in hybrid creatures of both sexes, cells of two sexes are generated: in the male, cells Dominant for maleness and cells Recessive for maleness—female that is; in the female, Recessive cells, prepotent for femaleness, and Dominant, or male, cells.

And of these, the Dominant male sex-cells contributed by the male parent, mating with the Dominant, or male, sex-cells contributed by the female parent, male offspring results. While the Recessive female sex-cells contributed by the female parent, mating with the Recessive, or female, sex-cells contributed by the male parent, female offspring results.

Furthermore, Dominance being paramount in development, it must be from the Dominant inherence imparted by residence in a male organisation to the potential, or Recessive, female Germ-Plasm that the latter derives the new developmental impulse it transmits to sex-cells. While Recessiveness being Life and Faculty in the potential mode, it must be from the Recessive inherence engendered in the Dominant male Germ-Plasm, by residence in a female organisation, that its Dominance, passing into latency, derives a new potential of further evolutionary impetus.

The differentiation of living creatures into two sexes, therefore, of bodies into two sides, of brains into two halves, and of Germ-Plasm into two reproductive glands, would seem to have had for object the ever further specialisation and segregation in the individual, for purposes alike of constitutional organisation and of the evolution of Faculty and Reproduction, of the two Orders of Contrasting Traits, which I have assumed to be Maleness and Femaleness, respectively.

From this view-point, the female Sex and Sex-traits are Recessive, or Potential, always, on the material plane, and manifest increasingly thereon only by way of ever more complex alliances with male-traits; which, being positive on the concrete plane, equip the female inherences for function thereon. Femaleness, or Recessiveness, on its side, however—being Life-Energy in the potential—is all the while engendering new potence for Dominance to transform into active, or functioning, power. While although negative, it is equally potent, on its side of the equation, to alter the values and manifestations of Dominance. Just as negative electricity inhibits the positive and destructive forces of positive electricity, although it does not, of itself, manifest directly.

The Dominant traits of Tallness and Strength, for example, are direct and positive factors in physical development. Dwarfness and Weakness are indirect and negative factors therein. Nevertheless, degrees of Dwarfness or of Weakness must proportionally reduce and modify the tallness of Tallness or the power of Strength.

But that Recessiveness is not a minus sign merely, as algebraically understood—but is an essential potence on another, and a psychical plane, is shown by the lesser height of woman rendering itself as a Grace; her lesser strength appearing in the new virtue of Gentleness.

That the female provides, for fertilisation, only a single sex-cell, from the reproductive gland of one or other side, while the male provides multiple and commingled cells from both sides, supports the view that sex-cells derived from one side are of opposite sex-inherence to those from the other side. Otherwise, why two reproductive glands?

The author of The Causation of Sex adduces evidence showing not only that the two glands are of opposite sex-inherence, but, moreover, that normally they function alternately; so that now a cell of one, now, of the other sex, is produced. It is likely, however, that function is seldom so mechanical, but that personal constitution or nurture modifies its operations.

That the male cells are multiple in number points to such a struggle of survival-fitness as ever characterises the more strenuous male destiny. Not, perhaps, the fittest as regards intrinsic superiority, but that most compatible with the requirements of the Queen-cell is selected for mate. Should the Queen-cell be of inferior standard, therefore, then (as happens in life) not the noblest of type, but that most adapted to environment secures racial survival.

So that here again, evolutionary racial advance may derive its impulse from the Female factor.

A singular phenomenon, recorded by the biologist, Rörig, and one which materially supports my argument, is that disease of the ovaries of a female deer will cause male antlers to develop in her. Proving a male organism concealed, or held Recessive, in her, by power of her female sex-organs normally to inhibit the development of her inherited male-traits. A strange feature of this abnormal occurrence is that disease of one ovary only causes antlers to develop on one side only—and this on the side opposite to that of the diseased gland.

On the other hand, castration of male sheep of the Merino breed (only the males of which are horned) occasions hornlessness.

V

Male traits being paramount on the plane of concrete function, although they exist (normally) in Recessive form in the female, it is from the male inherence of her active right side and its allied brain-half that she derives her concrete powers alike of body and of brain.

It is obvious, therefore, that when abnormally stimulated by undue exercise, such male-traits may develop into abnormal dominance.

The left arm of woman is essentially the woman-member. In its half-passive action of supporting her infant for hours together, it is stronger for this maternal ministration than is the more active and doughty right arm of the male. Her left hand is more delicate of form, gentler and more soothing of motion than her right hand is. It is the hand she caresses with. While for direct, strong action—masculine action, that is—the paternal right half of her is dominant, as in the male. And although in our present-day stages of Evolution, the Recessive Woman-traits have emerged as definite characteristics, emancipating themselves from subjection by the Dominant male-traits, it must be remembered that their impulse and their powers are yet but rudimentary. Woman is still more male than she is female; her methods being more masculine still than they are womanly. And this in the degree of her cruder racial stock, or of the harder conditions (natural or artificial) of the environment in which she finds herself, demanding more of masculine proclivity in her—of physical activity and mental assertiveness—than of her intrinsic Woman-qualities of emotion and ministry.

Civilisation, foreshadowing evolutionary ideals, discountenances, the fighting female. Nevertheless, the cruder female fights still with her male right arm, and the more cultured female, with tongue and tactics.

The intrinsic Woman-qualities, whereof Christianity is the gospel, are yet in their infancy of development; are yet more ideals for which we are shaping and waiting than they are realised and abiding facts.

Even their own babes are not secure from the instinct of blows inherent in the male-muscles of their mothers' right arms, when these are restrained neither by a woman's tenderness nor by a man's chivalry. Girl-babies, save those of the rarer higher types, beat their mothers and nurses only rather less frequently and less fiercely than boy-babies do.

Later in their life-history, that new impulse to the evolution of the Woman-traits which characterises their development to womanhood, normally negatives and further tempers in girls the male instincts of fight and of sport. But many of our modern amazons, brought up like boys, are more male than are their brothers. The male fighting-instinct which moved man to invent a club (destructive) has become so tempered by the increasingly potent Woman-traits in him that, save when angry or at war, he is content to turn his club into a golf-stick, a cricket bat, or tennis racquet; his sword into a plough-share. Whereas, on the contrary, the Woman-traits which moved woman to invent the needle (constructive) are becoming so over-ridden by the male in her that modern woman, artificially masculinised, abhors the needle, and is almost as much dominated as the other sex is by the male instinct for a weapon in the hand.

The class, Vertebrates, would seem to represent an adaptation to environment typically Male; earlier than and contrary in trend to that of the Mammalia, whereof the impulse was obviously Female.

Increasing vertebration was characterised by such a progressive differentiation of Male from Female traits as progressively segregated these in opposite sides of the body; with spinal column and spinal cord for, respectively, physical and nervous central lines of demarcation. Thus the Male traits were enabled more and more to detach themselves at will from Female inhibition, and thereby increasingly to specialise and exercise those powers of force and fierceness and activity by way of which species became ever more individuated; aggressive, intelligent, efficient, in terms of Fitness for the struggle for survival.

Until that later evolution of female adaptation to Unfitness, in the sacrificial function of Lactation, inhibiting and tempering the earlier male trend, engendered the yet higher order of Mammalia.

(With that intuitive illumination inspiring speech, men and races lacking in virility are contemptuously described as being "invertebrate.")

According to this hypothesis, the paternal (and male) inherences of any mother may be said to be transmitted to the grandson in the direct male line of her heredity—an unbroken line of Maleness reaching back to its amœbic origin. While the maternal (and female) inherences of any father are transmitted, in the direct female line, to the grand-daughter—a similar line of continuity. The Woman-sex and traits of the grandmother remain thus for a generation dormant, or Recessive, in the father; "skipping a generation," as the phrase is. Then, in the third generation, they re-appear in the grand-daughter; by power of a maternal contribution in which the female inherence is prepotent. While the male-sex and traits of the grandfather remain dormant, or potential, in the mother; likewise "skipping a generation." Then they emerge in the grandson, by power of a male gamete evoking the inherent male in them.

VI

The attributes of the one sex invested thus in the other, although normally submerged, form nevertheless a valuable endowment; supplying supplementary and complementary factors to counterpoise, to energise, and fructify the powers proper to the sex of the individual.

Man bears throughout life the Woman-potential his mother transmitted to him. But it is not his to realise. He bears it in trust for his daughters. He transmits it to his daughters, and in them this potential, recovering its woman-impulse, evolves to a further degree of woman-power. The like with mothers and sons.

All of which is supported by the Mendelian doctrine that the mother transmits "Femaleness" as a Dominant factor to her daughters and as a Recessive factor to her sons.

But the method whereby this is achieved has remained a mystery.

Professor Punnett says with regard to the phenomenon:

"The mother transmits to her daughter the dominant faculty of femaleness, but to balance this, as it were, she transmits to her sons another quality which her daughters do not receive ... among human families, in respect to particular qualities, the sons tend to resemble their mothers more than their daughters do."

A striking illustration of such transmission by mother to son of a paternally-derived abnormal inherence which she herself does not develop, is found in so-called "bleeders"; persons who suffer from the disease, hæmophilia. The daughters of a "bleeder" father show no symptom at all of the affliction, but they, nevertheless, pass on to their sons this male heritage of the grandfather.

There are numerous other examples of traits and diseases thus "skipping a generation"—in other words, of lying dormant, or potential, merely; overshadowed in the constitution and psychology of the sex to which they do not rightly belong, but developing in a succeeding generation in offspring of that sex whereof they are a natural trait, or (so to speak) a natural defect.

Since the woman-half she contributes to their hybrid constitution engenders the potential of their living processes, the mother may be regarded as still mothering her children throughout development and maturity, and to the end of their natural term. Accounting for that mystical sympathy between mother and child which intuitively informs her of fatalities occurring to absent sons and daughters—but to sons pre-eminently. Marvellously, they remain one living flesh so long as life persists.

During the War, mothers at a distance have known by an intuitive flash, and have told of the death of sons cut down in battle. One mother described the sensation she experienced as being precisely as though one side of her body had been suddenly torn away. So too, mothers whose infants have died during childbirth or shortly after, describe as persisting for months subsequently a sense as though part of them were dead.

The father too must function in the hybrid living constitution. With the immense difference, however, that his part therein is a factor of the development of traits, not of the mystical functioning of Life. A notable feature of this paternal heritage is that in women at middle-age (when the wane of reproductive power releases vital potential from maternal investments) not only may masculine physical traits emerge, but there may develop in them notable brain-capacities inherited from the father. Capacities inherent in them previously, but long inhibited in action by the normal female brain-Recessiveness.

VII

Every higher evolutionary differentiation results inevitably not only in progressive mutations in the traits of species, but, as well, in variations of the reproductive processes of such. When defects, physical or mental, are not reproduced in later generations true to Mendelian law, however, this is not abnormal, but is beautifully normal. Normality requires that defect—which is a deviation from The Normal—shall not be transmitted in any ratio whatsoever, but shall be corrected in a succeeding generation.

Moreover, when we realise the number and the complexities of human traits, all struggling to keep The Law, it is only to be expected that any single characteristic owing to its sex-inherence, may pass into the potential or Recessive, mode, and may thus vanish for a generation. Further, by the law of compensation, any trait or determinant, although itself Dominant, may be dwarfed and submerged by some other Dominant trait more assertive than itself.

Suppose a father normally larger and stronger than the normally shorter and weaker mother: Stature and strength being both Dominant and masculine traits, the traits of such a father, dominating the development of his sons, should so over-ride the traits of lesser strength and stature of the mother (in whom strength and stature are normally Recessive) that his sons will be tall and broad and strong, and mentally virile. On the other hand, the mother's traits, prepotent in the development of daughters, will inhibit in these and diminish the strength and stature of their paternal inherences. Thus, the woman of pure Recessive (the essential woman) type is smaller, more delicately organised, and weaker than the male.

By such means, the normal of the relative strength, stature, and mental qualifications of the sexes is preserved; the specialised characteristics of both ever further diverging in trend, while at the same time intensifying their intrinsic attributes.

Suppose, however, a mother who deviates from the normal in having developed along masculine lines, and who is, accordingly, tall or strong or mentally virile: Far from supplementing, in her sons, the father's traits of strength and stature, her sons will be more or less emasculate in mind or body, or in both. Strength and stature and virile mentality not being normal to her, these can only have emerged in her and can only have been exercised by her at cost of the masculine potential she bore in trust for male offspring. A woman who wins golf or hockey-matches may be said therefore to energise her muscles with the potential manhood of possible sons. With their potential existence indeed, since over-strenuous pursuits may sterilise women absolutely as regards male offspring.

Thus it is that muscular and otherwise masculine women produce weakling males. (Giant women—female-Dominants—are incapable of reproduction.) Tall mothers may produce tall sons, by transmitting to them the single trait of tallness of the maternal grandfather. But since tallness in woman is development along masculine lines, and detracts from her maternal power, the tall son in such case is likely to be defective in other manly traits. Men are of greater height than women, mainly in consequence of greater length of leg. The power expended in the male in length of limb is absorbed in the female into complex pelvic developments, wherein it is stored as Reproductive potential.

The power thus stored in latency reveals itself in the amazing evolution, as regards capacity and muscular equipment, by way of which the maternal uterus so develops during pregnancy as to enable it to cradle an infant of 9 or 10 lbs. weight, and to deliver this by output of immense energy—a marvel of biological function and mechanism.

Since the male trait of Tallness may be transmitted by woman from her father to her son, without manifesting in herself, it is obviously waste of power for her to develop a characteristic she needs neither for personal nor for hereditary purposes. Whereas, by further evolving her own woman-traits of suppleness and grace, she contributes new factors to those of the male. And so with all the other sex-characteristics.

Mr. Horace G. Regnart, M.A., the well-known breeder of pedigree stock, states that a bull of marked masculine characteristics sires daughters of marked feminine characteristics. While the feminine cow bears sons of strongly masculine type. On the other hand, the daughters of a "steery" bull (a bull of de-sexed type) are themselves defective in female characteristics, and bear sons defective in male characteristics.

VIII

Clearly and fully defined, accordingly, as Sex-characteristics are in proportion as the individual is of high and normal organisation, obtrusions in the one sex of the traits of the other are as much stigmata of abnormality as are cleft-palate, webbed feet, or other deviations from the normal. Because they are reversions to lower types of organisation in which sex was less highly differentiated than is the normal of to-day.

Although, with progressive evolution, the Sex-traits are spun ever finer and finer, and are ever more subtly and inextricably interwoven with those of the other, normally the threads run true and distinct as do the threads of warp and woof in textile fabric.

The ever finer spinning of the threads secures an ever closer, subtler interweaving. Whereby the fabric of human organisation, of character and Faculty, becomes ever firmer yet more supple, ever stronger yet more delicate, ever more intense and rich of colour, but nevertheless more beautifully harmonised and subtilised by half-tones and complex gradations.

This is the reason why the strongest and most virile men are the most humane; the sternest are most tender; the greatest are most subtle. So inextricably interwoven with their virile characteristics are the finer spun Woman-potencies, as strangely and exquisitely to temper and sensitise their Manhood's powers.

And it is why the tenderest, most womanly women are the noblest; the gentlest are the most enduring; the wisest are the sweetest.

But no more than Black can be White, Acid, Alkaline, or the Straight line a Circle, can Repose be Action, Sternness be Sweetness, Firmness be Softness, Fierceness be Gentleness; Assertiveness, Selflessness; Boldness, Modesty. Nevertheless, in the hybrid unfoldment of Contrasting traits, Softness tempering Fierceness transforms it to Strength; Sweetness tempering Sternness melts it to Mercy; Assertiveness reinforcing Selflessness nerves it to Devotion; Firmness preserves Softness from lapsing to Weakness; Altruism, inspiring Chivalry, transfigures it to Heroism. But that Fierceness and Strength, Sweetness and Selflessness, have only intensified as, with further evolution, they have extended further into Life and Consciousness, is shown when they tear themselves asunder from their counterpoising attributes. Fierceness is seen then to be more fierce in complex man—because fierce in so many more and deeper issues of Life and Consciousness—than is the fierceness of the gorilla, which manifests largely in muscular savagery; champing of jaws, and beating on its breast as on a drum.

So too, the emotion of complex woman is more deeply rooted in her, and is more intense, than is the instinctive emotionalism of the savage woman which expresses itself mainly in reflex movements and hysterical outcries.

* * * * *

Thus down the ages, man, by way of Fatherhood, has endowed woman ever further with his developing traits of strength and intelligence. Woman, by way of Motherhood, has endowed man with an ever fuller heritage of her attributes of selflessness and intuition.

So these poor souls—the Man and the Woman in all men and women—have climbed the steep ascent together, hand in hand, toward the Light. Without the other, neither could have come. So tragically drear and solitary would have been the pilgrimage, save for the spiritual converse of that mystical comrade.

Only by way of this psychical comradeship, which solaces the one sex by the inspiration of the other, do men and women win through the terrestrial travail of the human destiny.

The mystical Man (who is her father in her) when woman would falter and fail in the fight, whispers, "Courage, dear Girl, go on!"

The mystical Woman (who is his mother in him) goes with her son into the murk and struggle of temptation, holding her lamp of The Good and The True and The Beautiful before his blinding eyes.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Owing to an interchange of nervous strands, the right half of the brain controls the left half of the body; and the converse. Structural details which need not be considered here, but which have clearly for purpose the closer and more complex association and co-ordination of the Contrasting Traits of the two sides of the body.

CHAPTER V

MASCULINE MOTHERS PRODUCE EMASCULATE SONS BY MISAPPROPRIATING THE LIFE-POTENTIAL OF MALE OFFSPRING

"The truth, when it is discovered, is what every one has known."

I

Mendel found that the hybrid plants resulting from his cross-breedings of Dominants with Recessives produced, when mated with similar hybrids, sex-cells of pure Dominant and sex-cells of pure Recessive types, and, moreover, a proportion of sex-cells of mixed type, corresponding to the grey rabbit-offspring of a black rabbit that has mated with a white.

So too, are found among humans, four types of men and women such as might be expected under my application of Mendelian doctrine: Homozygotes for Traits, or pure typical men and women—Dominant males and Recessive females, respectively; and Heterozygotes for Traits, or mixed types—Dominant females and Recessive males.

Of the pure Masculine type, are men who are wholly male in body, mind and bent; active, energetic, enterprising; pioneers of material progress; State-builders, city-builders, trade-builders, financiers, explorers, soldiers, men of affairs. Of the Mixed type, are men who, while being virile of body and mind, possess nevertheless a greater admixture of womanly quality than is strictly normal. These are the artists, poets, writers, doctors, priests, philanthropists.

Among women also, are two kindred orders; the wholly womanly—pure unalloyed types of natural woman, wife and mother, sister, friend; and women who, while being wholly womanly too in attribute and trend, possess, nevertheless, underlying manly faculties which give broader scope and effectiveness to abstract and impersonal issues of their own sex-characteristics. These are the artists and poets and writers who present the Woman point of view. They are the Florence Nightingales, the Charlotte Brontës, Mary Somervilles; the philanthropists, reformers, born physicians, teachers, nurses, and so forth; whose part it is to mother, befriend and inspire humanity at large rather than to minister to individuals. Whose part it is, as well, to extend the tender, purifying ethics of Woman and The Home ever further and more deeply into public life, public work, and public administration.

Such men and women possess the characteristics of their own sex fully differentiated, but tinctured and fructified by more than a normal quotum of the characteristics of the other. They are quite normal, however, and are wholly invaluable in their contribution to the world's affairs. Admirably manly or womanly, they bear but little likeness to the hereditarily-defective or to the artificially-manufactured species—mannish women and womanish men. They deviate from the essential Man and Woman types by degrees of overlapping in the higher mental attributes. In all the main characteristics of Sex, physical, mental and functional, they are completely men and women. The abnormal mixed types are, on the contrary, more or less degenerate, structurally, functionally and mentally. These persons of natural Mixed Types are Nature's workers rather than the parents of her Races. The daily round is too restricted for them. Their abilities and bent claim wider fields. The home cannot contain them. It is too round to fit their angles. They are hampered by its reciprocities, stifled by its personal atmosphere, restive beneath its obligations. And not seldom they succeed in making homes as uncomfortable for others as they themselves find such.

These Heterodox—of which mould Genius is—are indispensable to spur and quicken human progress, while adding nothing to the personal evolution of the Human Type. They advance the standards and the ethics of Humanity by creating ideals in Art, in Literature, in Politics, in Reform and Philanthropy. But only too often they fall short, in their own lives, of the standards and ideals they establish for the world at large.

The Advance-guard of Faculty, they break new ground of Mind and Morale for others to cultivate. Although they themselves frequently quarrel with life, they make life in general greater and happier for their fellows. If women, they possess much of the initiative and energy, the intellect and chivalry of men. But they apply these to womanly ends. If men, they possess much of the insight and sympathy, the altruism and creativeness of women. But they devote these to manly achievements.

Herbert Spencer held that Genesis (or reproductive power) and Individuation (or Self-development) exist in inverse ratio. Which is because individuation beyond the normal can only be achieved by drawing upon the vital potential of offspring. Hence, these strong individualities of Mixed Type—because reproductive power is diminished in them—but seldom transmit their abilities to offspring. Genius is frequently sterile. Otherwise, its children are of inferior calibre.

It is in imitation, doubtless, of the natural Mixed Types—which may be described as a normal deviation from The Normal—that the cult of the mannish woman is being cruelly and disastrously forced upon our latter-day girls and women; resulting in wholly deplorable developments.

The woman of natural Mixed-type is essentially womanly in aim and bent. She does womanly work with virile energy and masculine mental grip. But she never (or seldom) assumes male proclivities or adopts male habits; crazes to wear trousers, to ride astraddle, to smoke, spit, swear, stride, talk slang, or shoot living sentient creatures. Nor does she otherwise exchange the more highly-evolved and delicate morale and manners of woman for those of the male. In Art, in Literature, in Science; in Industry and Reform, her aims and work preserve the womanly mode and outlook.

II

In consequence of doctrine which, for several generations, has trained women to develop for their own uses the masculine potential belonging to sons, many of our present-day boys and girls are seen actually to have exchanged their natural sex-characteristics. Boys are born now, puny, neurotic, and effeminate; while girls are strong and male and masterful. And it is precisely in the families whereof the girls are strong and male and masterful, that the boys are weakly and effeminate; the degenerative lapse from The Normal expressing itself, in both sexes, in terms of abnormal characteristics of the other sex.

That at thirteen, girls now-a-days are taller and heavier than boys of the same age has been established by the Anthropometrical Committee of the British Association.

Dr. J. J. Heslop, after carefully observing the health and the physical growth of children in fourteen elementary schools belonging to the Stretford (Lancashire) Education Authority, has published a striking return of his investigations. The following table shows the average height and weight at this age:

The most notable development among girls takes place between the eleventh and thirteenth years.

The opposite bias in this abnormal substitution of alien sex-traits is due presumably, in both sexes, to an antagonising and neutralising of the qualities normal to the one sex by emergence of those of the other. Thus, the boy is puny and emasculate because his impoverished maleness is too feeble to dominate the Female traits inherent in him, as is normal to males. The girl is big and crude and masterful because her impoverished Womanliness is inadequate to inhibit and refine her inherent Male traits.

The aims of Feminism are being realised in unforeseen developments. Because in addition to extinguishing the most beautiful and inspiring order of human qualities, this masculinising of women is burdening the Race and deteriorating type by producing an ever-increasing number of neurotic, emasculate men and boys.

III

The present-day Mortality-rate of boy-babies has become increasingly and alarmingly high.

The mortality-rate of males is higher always than is that of females, because of the greater hardships and dangers of men's pursuits. This is one of the reasons why, although, normally, boys are born in greater number (about 1050 to every 1000 girls) the female (pre-war) population of England and Wales exceeded the male population by the huge majority of 1,205,311.

But the excess of male over female infant-mortality has greatly increased of late years. In 1860 it was only 9 per cent. In 1913 it had leapt to the high figure of 23 per cent. And this diminishing vital power of males begins before birth even, 180 boys being born prematurely as compared with 145 girls. Of boys born, 7 die from inborn physical defects, as compared with 6 girls. While, before the age of three months, 4 boys die to every 3 girls. Among 1000 infants dying before they are a year old, only 96 are girls, as compared with 120 boys. Recent statistics show that in rural Westmoreland, 48 boys under a year old died, while only 21 girls of the same age succumbed. In Wiltshire, the ratio was 135 boys to 78 girls.

To quote from a writer on these startling statistics of the Registrar-General:—

"Tuberculous diseases, convulsions, intestinal troubles, bronchitis and pneumonia, and other maladies, all kill more boy than girl-infants in their first year. The figures are surprising. Omitting fractions, we find that among 1000 infants of each sex 21 boys die of intestinal troubles to 17 girls; 10 boys die of convulsions to 8 girls; 21 boys die from bronchitis and pneumonia to 17 girls; and 14 boys from other causes to 11 girls. Whooping-cough stands alone, carrying off 3·15 girls to 2·65 boys. Even when chloroform or ether is given for the purposes of an operation it kills more boys than girls."

It may be objected that, according to my view, the mortality of girls, bred of constitutionally impoverished males, should likewise have increased. But this high mortality among boy-infants and children must so weed out the weakliest males that many of these do not live to become fathers. Moreover, by developing into abnormal dominance the male potential in her, the mother de-vitalises sons more than she de-vitalises daughters.

Further, these crude hoyden-sisters of the weakly boys fail rather in the higher attributes of Sex than in mere survival-power. They survive, but they are marred in type by the stigmata of sex-immaturity or abnormality.

Increasing sex-impoverishment is bringing into vogue—almost as a matter of routine—the performance on male infants of an unnatural (and a degenerative) Jewish rite.

IV

Of the many theories advanced to explain the determination of Sex in offspring, the true one is, undoubtedly, the relative parental power of the respective parents.

Normally, this being well-balanced, the ratio of the sexes is about equal; the preponderance being on the male side, however, owing to the maternal parental potential being normally greater, because conserved by reason of her less onerous rôle in life. When parental potential is relatively greater in the father, female offspring is born. When greater in the mother, male offspring results. In the families of men notably virile, daughters preponderate. In those of women notably womanly, sons are in the majority. (Presuming in such case the parent of the other sex to be of average potence.)

The preponderance of male-births during War-conditions is due to the fact that by far the greater stress of these conditions, with consequent depletion of vital reserves, falls upon the males. Hence the women—who although depleted likewise by the increased demands upon them, are less vitally exhausted than the men are—become relatively prepotent in parental potential. The more virile men being absent on military duty, moreover, the less virile members of the sex it is who preponderate in the paternal rôle.

Other parental factors, as of age, health and circumstance, which affect the sex of offspring, do so indirectly by their effects upon the relative vital and parental potential of mother and father.

In corroboration of the view that power conserved in the mother engenders Maleness and masculine vigour in offspring, I have received the following letter from the Head-mistress of the village-school of Corley:

"I was much interested in your article re Boy-babies. I think my school here is unique, there being 86 children on the roll, of whom 57 are boys and 29, girls. And of the children in the village who will be of age for admission this year, 7 are boys and 3, girls.

"In the village there are several families composed of boys only.

One family has 7 boys and 2 girls.

One family has 6 boys and 0 girls.

Two families have 5 boys and 1 girl each.

Two families have 4 boys and 1 girl each.

"Of one family reckoning 6 boys (1 dead; making 7 in all) the mother has but one leg—the other having been amputated when she was fourteen.[2] None of the mothers here (so for as I can learn) do work outside their homes; except in odd cases, an odd day's washing or cleaning.

"None do regular work on farms, or otherwise.

"All the children are well-fed, clean and well clothed. Our Medical Nurse says she finds the finest babies here—of the whole of her district. For 57 years the yearly returns in School have shown a great preponderance of boys over girls."

The writer contrasts this Utopian order of things with her experience of the rickety and otherwise diseased and defective states of school-children whose mothers were employed in factories.

V

It would seem that the embryological development of the male brain and nervous system, it is which demands more of vital expenditure on the part of the mother than does that of the female brain; less elaborately differentiated as is this in respect of concrete intellection and physical adaptation.

For this reason, not only is more constitutional vitality on the mother's part required for the production of sons—and more particularly of virile sons—but the production of male offspring entails more stress, and exacts a greater toll, physical and psychical, than does the ante-natal nurture of the female embryo. Mothers who have borne female children with but little constitutional strain or suffering may be greatly debilitated, even invalided, during pregnancy with male offspring. One finds women permanently weakened in constitution and function, indeed, from the strain of producing a male. In such cases, the male may be exceptional of type. Or the mother may be of exceptionally low vitality.

It has been argued that defect and degeneracy, as hare-lip, cleft-palate, clubbed or webbed-foot, are more common in the male because he is normally less highly-developed than the female is. The contrary is obviously the case. In creating a difficult and a simpler thing, there will necessarily be more failures in the difficult than in the simpler product. Being nearer to Nature, the female is usually more true to the normal type of species. But the type is not so fully differentiated, or specialised in relation to environment, as is the male.

It is significant that the female aphis, when its vital potential is stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the male, but breeds females only. Supporting not only the view that the female is the rootstock of species, while the male is, so to speak, an alien grafted upon it, but indicating too, that the production of females represents less output of reproductive energy, since one sex alone is able to accomplish this.

VI

Absence both of womanly emotion and of spiritual attribute disqualifies the faces of the greater number of our modern "beauties" from being truly beautiful. They lack those last exquisite touches which psychical qualities bestow; sweetness, tenderness, gaiety, pensiveness, mystery, mockery, witchery, wistfulness, surrender, resistance, maidenhood, motherhood—the celestial and the terrestrial melting into one another like the colours of the rainbow.

Since evolution is advancing in some stock, modern beauty is, no doubt, of higher calibre than has been attained in any previous epoch. But for the most part, the faces of our handsome women are pre-eminently pagan—bold, sophisticated, clever; without sweetness, softness, imagination, sensitiveness—in a word, without Soul. The outlines, howsoever fine, are hard and antipathetic in their uncompromising firmness. The eyes are cold and critical and challenging, so that their relentless gaze is sometimes rather of the nature of a blow than it is a sympathy.

Owing to that setting of the jaw which attends strong muscular action, the shaping bones of the faces of developing girls thicken and coarsen, and the naturally delicate, beautiful contours of chin and of cheek deteriorate to the crude and heavy lower jaws characteristic of a very large order of the sex to-day.

The weak receding, or the sharply-pointed chin of the over-feminised type—both early-Victorian and modern—errs in the other direction. To give fine balance to the face and form—as to the mind—the Male traits must be duly represented. These broaden and strengthen the curves, and preserve them from lapsing to narrowness and feebleness; lending touches of straightness and firmness which nobly enhance the graces. In excess, they mar and deface, however; as is exemplified in the strong and slovenly features, without drawing or delicacy, which characterise the new type of girl being turned out by our schools and colleges, most of which make now-a-days a speciality of sports. Similar heavy jaws and blunt, amorphous features are replacing in our working-girls, de-sexed by masculine employments, the classic, nobly-modelled lineaments which made our Anglo-Saxon Race once the most beautiful, as it was the most vigorous and enterprising, of the nations. Such faces may be deplorably senseless for the sense—and lack of sensibility—in them.

The facial type of the opposite extreme is ultra-feminine—a cameo-like reversion to an earlier Victorian physiognomy, to which several generations of mothers have failed to add any new quality. But, unlike its Victorian prototype, the modern ultra-feminine face lacks blood and emotion, and shows like a faded attenuation thereof. The cold, delicate features, with the pinched nostrils which, owing to adenoid obstruction, have never expanded to a full, inspiring breath of Life, suggest further cameo-comparison; as being the daintily-carven shell of an extinct creature.

So devitalised and neurasthenic are many of our pretty young girls, that their flowerlike faces, topping over-tall and undeveloped bodies, suggest delicate blossoms crowning long attenuated, sapless stems. Neither faces nor bodies are vitalised and athrill with powers rooted in healthful organs; vivified by healthful functions, and instinct with warm, iron-rich, magnetic blood. They show that making for beauty which is inherent in the Woman-traits, but which, in latter-day girls, owing to defective constitutional vigour or to educational, social or industrial exhaustion, has been able to realise itself only in sickly and weed-like development.

Life manifests in these neurotics in the form of vivacities merely; not as vitalities.

Severed from their natural roots in Life and vital function, they resemble nothing more than charming cut-blossoms gracefully fading on drawing-room shelves.

The truth is that girls brought up on modern strenuous methods skip the years between 16 and 26. If young and fresh at 16, all at once we find them 26 in constitution and in temperament—a little lean, a little lined, a little wan, a little shrill, a little chill, and only too often more than a little disillusioned and cynical—in a word already passées. Some are, of course, an interesting and attractive 26, but the fresh, warm, vital and beautiful years from 17 to 27, the years of a natural woman's most charming bloom of mind and body, have dropped from their lives, like petals from roses. So that our girls in their 'teens require to hide the ravages of time by every sort of artifice. And at 26 in years, they are approaching the forties in constitution and temperament; are even keen on politics, cards, finance—resorts, pre-eminently, of materialistic middle-age.

This blighting of young womanhood, with loss of youthful bloom and responsiveness, it is that has led to the decadent and demoralising vogue of the Flapper. Since, beyond all things, men seek vital youth and freshness in the other sex, to find it now-a-days, they must seek it in children.

VII

Deplorable are the degenerative processes by way of which those noble natural characteristics of the Woman-sex which Nature has achieved by ages of evolutionary advance may be observed to lapse, and are presently all but obliterated from the woman form and face.

Increasingly the curves straighten; the conflict between straight lines and curves occasioning wrinkles. The jaw squares. The lips lose womanly fullness, sweetness, and their natural colour and texture of rose-leaves; becoming thin and pale and stern. Shadows gather round them, foreshadowing, it may be, a masculine growth of hair. Hair loses lustre and grows sparse, particularly above the brows. The chin loses its feminine softness; rigidity and grimness being substituted. Eyes lose fullness, tenderness, brilliance, and woman's normal melting expression. The glance grows chill, hard, shrewd, direct. Crowsfeet mar the modelled lids. The serene, inspiring woman-brows are furrowed by the permanent frown of eye-strain or of nervous tension. The voice falls flat and metallic, or drops into gruffness and harshness; losing its delicate tuneful inflections, its sympathetic timbre, its joyous quality. The cheeks hollow; the white temples are wrecked.

In the faces of women whose systems are functioning healthfully, a number of exquisite artistries in cellular texture of skin and in tinting appear; the skin beneath the eyes differing from that of the cheeks, that of the brows differing from that of the chin, that above the mouth from that below, and so forth. In women subjected to constitutional strain, all these exquisite artistic differentiations—product of incalculable evolutionary developments—are obliterated; the skin over the whole face becoming of the same grain and hue, as is normal to the male. The body becomes spare and sinewy, or set and spread; its movements heavy and abrupt. And more and more the hidden male emerges from the wreckage. The male right arm, swinging like a pendulum, suggests itself as being the motive-power of the ungraceful mechanism.

With the increasing maleness of physique, male mental proclivities develop; obsessions to wear trousers, to smoke, to stride, to kill, and otherwise to indulge the masculine bent.

* * * * *

It may be objected that Beauty takes too high a place in the counsels of this book. Beauty is Normality, however. Nature, in her every aim and handiwork, makes beyond every other thing for grace. Weed and moth, shell and beetle, humming-bird and dragon-fly—all are lovely in technique and artistry. Plainness and uncouthness in humans only too often belie noble mind or disposition. This results, however, from such failure of vital resources that the individual had fine material only to equip his mind, and none left over to adorn his body.

One sees the converse too, where all the available potential of beauty has been lavished on handsome exteriors.

Plainness is a mark of abnormality. The victim may be normal in other respects. But in this, he or she is abnormal. And more particularly she—since Woman is both medium and Creatrix of living harmony and grace. So is comeliness declining, however, that one of the specifications of a recent Baby-Competition was that beauty would not be a necessary qualification.

Yet Beauty is the natural birthright and The Normal of all babes and children.

VIII

The Male cult is impressed now at the earliest age. Some of our hapless little girls, in consequence of having been subjected early to strain of masculine drill, hockey, cricket and other rough and strenuous exertions, are more like colts or smaller-sized bullocks in their crude conformation and ungainly movements, as also in their crude mentality and manners, than they are like charming human maids.

Few developments in life are prettier or more engaging than is a natural little girl. The sex of her, with its fair Woman-attributes, reveals itself early in children of high organisation. Crowned by her curls, in her simple white frock, she is as fresh and dainty, as winsome and elusive as a fairy. Her little Woman-soul begins to make for beauty ere ever she can walk. Ere ever she can walk, she moves her limbs in rhythm of the dance. She tries to sing. She stretches out a tiny finger and reverently touches a bright colour—a blue ribbon, a gold button, a pink flower on a chintz. Set her in a field, she runs to cram her hands with daisies. She fills, within the House of Life, an exquisite small niche that nothing else can fill.

Yet now they are cropping her fair curls, are exchanging her white frock for masculine knickers. They are training her soft limbs and exquisite elastic movements to the hard and rigid action of the soldiers' drill and march; are teaching her to stride her pony that once she sat as prettily and lightly as a bird; are making a hard, boisterous tom-boy of her, with lusty, hairy limbs and uncouth manners; perverting all her natural highly-differentiated delicate attributes and graces to clumsy lower-grade form and activities.

They have robbed her of her Doll, whose helplessness and wax perfection fostered sentiments of worship, tenderness and ministry in her. They have given her a whipping-top, which—unlike the boy, who pleasures in the skill and mechanism of its handling—she lashes with contorted features and neurotic spitefulness.

With characteristic scorn of physical disability, Feminism contemns old age as disease or degeneracy—a weakness to be combated with latter-day strenuousness, cloaked by a counterfeit youthfulness, forced exertions (even games!) simulated youthful zests and gaieties.

Beyond all things, women are exhorted not to allow themselves to "grow old" as their grandmothers did, sitting, comely and tranquil and wise, at their quiet firesides.

Yet the truth is, Age is a natural beautiful phase; in its way, as natural, as healthful and as beautiful as are any of the younger seasons. Calm and stately as the snows of Nature's winter, as Nature's winter shows us, old age does not presage death—because there is no Death. That we call Death is but a temporary Recession from the Outer and Terrestrial to the Inner and Celestial zone of Being. And with the vital quietude and longer-sightedness of eyes, come spiritual quickening and longer-sightedness of mental view. So that both eyes and mind perceive The Outer more and more obscurely, focusing more and more on The Remote. The stream of life runs stilly for the reason that it runs more deep; centring again to that Within and Spiritual, whence it issued in Birth, and will issue again in re-Birth.

Compare such serene-faced, dignified age, cause to all of reverence and tenderness, for the mystery and pathos of its wise and tranquil resignation—Compare such with the restless, harried, malcontent old age of modern counsels!

IX

Before the advent of that admirable institution, the Eugenics Education Society, for the establishment of a new Science of Heredity, as, too, of a new propaganda of Race-Culture, vital and illuminating data, not only of supreme scientific interest but, moreover, of the greatest practical significance, passed, for the most part, unnoted.

I venture to believe, however, that Eugenic propaganda has been too much in the direction of eliminating defect from the Race by prohibiting marriage to the so-called "Unfit." Whereas the true way of Racial health, of normality and excellence, is, surely, to eliminate from life the many conditions, material, economic, and personal, which make for Unfitness—which preclude, indeed, the survival of little save Unfitness.

For since we are not in the secret of Nature's aims, and are wholly in the dark as to the human type for which she is aiming, to prohibit parenthood to any but the flagrantly abnormal, the insane and imbecile, the epileptic and the hopelessly-diseased, might be to quench the evolution of such higher Fitness as we are not qualified to foresee. That which shows like disability in one age may be the incipient ability of a later. In cruder, primitive days, when standards of Fitness were physical strength, rapacity and cunning, honesty and mercy, and more delicate organisation of body—the starting-points of new routes of evolutionary development—would have been condemned as worthy only of extermination.

In sickly and declining stock there may exist, moreover, an ebbing vein of rare faculty, which, re-vitalised by a due potential of maternal re-creative power, might come to throb with genius.

Realising all the factors—the innumerable lives, the incalculable personal traits, endeavours and experiences, that have gone to make the Individualism of any strain of stock, and realising that just these factors of Individualism can have occurred in one line only of human ascent and can never be repeated, it becomes clear that summarily to extinguish any human strain, by arbitrary prohibition, would be to exterminate a unique branch of the great Life-tree, and thereby to deprive the Race of a specialised route of further ascent; a route which no other stock could supply.

The fact that great families, with great histories and talents behind them, fall into decadence shows that even in decadent stock are inherences of greatness which might be recruited to greatness again. While apart from all this, the right of Parenthood, with the evolutionary impulse to character and faculty consequent upon the exercise of parental functions, is the birthright of every individual capable of fulfilling such. The counsel of Selective Parenthood is dangerous doctrine, indeed. Given Life, Nature by her methods of Disease is able to eliminate stock too deteriorate for, or beside her purpose. But she alone knows her purpose. And she alone can judge as to what is intrinsic Fitness for Survival.

Selective Parenthood makes, moreover, for the elimination of those valuable object-lessons of inherited defect and disease, whereby Nature points her inestimable morals of healthy and disciplined living. For evasion, too, of those penalties and burdens in the care and maintenance of the Unfit, which a nation justly incurs by such social wrongs and maladministrations as are largely responsible for disease and defect.

The doctrine of operative sterilisation is not only humanly repugnant but, in view of the psychological import of every physical function, it is essentially evil.

X

Some momentous morals of the Feminist trend are pointed by the Insect-world, which may be regarded as a devolutionary back-water, wherein Life is slowly ebbing toward extinction by fluctuating out in ever smaller, meaner, drabber, ineffective, pulseless and spectral existences—chill and teeming myriads unwarmed by the throb of emotion, unillumined by the light of Mind. Dust which, raised from dust by power of Life, has caught the trick of living, and goes on living and perpetuating, without cause or impulse other than age-old, time-worn mechanistic habit imparted by the state of living.

And in this phantom under-world of Decadence, cast by the shadow of Life and peopled with distorted images thereof, the females are Dominant—larger in size, stronger, more active, more enterprising and ferocious than the males. As in the world of Vegetation, by way whereof Matter first quickened into Life, so in this realm of Insectivoræ by way of which Life is gravitating back to the inertia of Inorganic Matter, in ever shallower, denser and more sluggish strata, the male is seen as appanage and victim of the female.

In the beehive, he appears as ineffective drone amid a throng of strenuous neuter female-workers. And a female is his Queen.

Significant again is it that insect-females are seen increasingly to have emancipated themselves from mother-instincts and maternal functions, as regards nurture or affection for their young. The single process wherein the warring males and snarling females of finer fierce, evolving species sheathe their claws and mute their hates in a co-operative, self-effacing instinct—Reproduction, here in this disintegrating world of Devolution, functions without welding spark, or lighting gleam of parent-altruism. At best, it is as chill, as colourless and meticulously mechanical as the interminable tickings of a world of clockwork. At worst, it is a repulsive rapacity on the part of females to secure perpetuation. And this secured, they straightway sting the craven male to death, or tear him limb from limb and ghoulishly devour him.

Queen Bee leads her vassal suitors so strenuous and dizzying an ante-nuptial dance, for privilege of mating with her, that only one survives to claim the prize; the others dropping, dead and dying, in the wake of her murderous supremacy. And, as with other masculine and muscular females, her progeny are neuter working-females (sterile) and emasculate males (drones).

As Feminists demand for human babes, the Bee-mother hands over her offspring to be brought up by the State. While some other insect-mothers, having reposited their eggs (to serve as bombs that explode and devastate their living hosts) straightway abandon them, and return to the more strenuous and repulsive female-pursuits of this Phantasmagoria-world—a clockwork kingdom fabricated of Life's debris, and drably mimicking the throb and motion of its mechanism in ghoulish mockeries and vacuous reiterations; the while it runs down slowly, ticking back to the molecular vibration of mineral inertia.

END OF BOOK I

Note.—Mendelian and other readers interested in the more scientific aspects of the subject are referred to an Appendix at the end of this volume, in which these issues are further considered and some important evidences adduced.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] I have observed that lameness in women, by restricting physical activities and thus conserving vital energy, conduces to male offspring. The fact may well have been the origin of the Chinese custom of crippling the feet of female children. In my own professional practice, by prohibiting all strenuous and exhausting pursuits, intellectual, social or athletic, before and after marriage, I have succeeded in securing male offspring in patients whose stock had for generations given birth to girls only. In those organically de-sexed by male pursuits, rest will not avail, of course.—Author.

BOOK II

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN DECADENCE

CHAPTER I

DECLINE AND FALL OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DUE TO FEMINISM

"This is the function of our and every age, to grasp the knowledge already existing, to make it our own, and in so doing to develop it further and raise it to a higher level. In thus taking it to ourselves we make it different from what it was."—Hegel.

I

Ancient history is depressing study.

It shows us peoples rising slowly and laboriously out of states of barbarism to high degrees of culture and enlightenment, and then, more or less suddenly, falling upon decline; lapsing to total extinction, even. One after another, we may watch them climb the Evolutionary Hill, then slacken pace and struggle on spasmodically. Till presently we find them steadily losing ground; slowly at first, but, gathering momentum, regressing more and more rapidly, until finally they are seen racing headlong to destruction.

Of some among the proudest and the greatest Civilisations, so absolute has been their ultimate extinction that nothing more than ruined temples and some statuary remain to mark their quondam glory.

Biologists tell us this is natural. Races, they say—like individuals—have only a certain life-tenure. They are born, develop, attain maturity, lapse to old age and then die; just as men do.

The analogy is not sound, however. Because although individual men die, the stock they leave behind, if duly preserved and replenished by fresh blood, may live indefinitely. Moreover, such records as remain show that these past civilisations died, obviously, not of natural old age—but of disease. Natural old age is sane and wise, and self-controlled; healthful in mind and in body. Whereas the main features characterising the decline of these great powers, were viciousness and licentiousness; physical, mental and moral corruption. Theirs was no passing in gradual waning of strength and quiet dissolution; not even in senility. They may be described, on the contrary, as having rushed helter-skelter upon death in full vigour of their prime. We see in them, indeed, all the vehemence and self-destructive forces of "sthenic" disease—disease as it occurs in strong men struck down in full health. They died in riot, venality, and lust, and every other form of vice and evil. Clearly, they died unnaturally—of disease, not naturally of old age.

How and why then did this happen? How and why should disease thus have stricken these in mid-career? Since history shows the political institutions, the laws and the administration of many of such mighty decadents to have reached high levels of excellence, in respect of justice and intelligence, while Culture, Art and Industry were likewise notable among them, the causes of their downfall must be looked for elsewhere than in their sociology.

And since all human processes, sociological as well as natural, have their roots in Biology, we are led to examine such records as remain, for evidences of biological failure. Healthy and vigorous races do not decline in consequence of unjust laws or maladministration. If they are healthy and vigorous, they reform these.

II

Investigation shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and licence of their women were conspicuous. And realising Woman's portentous rôle in Racial advance, it is difficult to believe anything but that her rôle must be equally potent in Racial decline.

A nation becomes decadent because the individuals composing it have become decadent. The individuals composing it can only have become progressively decadent by progressive hereditary decadences. And since Woman is the racial reservoir and the Agency of Evolution, hereditary decline of individuals and nations must have its source in a decline of mother-power.

History confirms this view. It shows the progress and waxing supremacy of these great powers to have been concurrent with rising levels of womanly character and virtue, with high regard for woman by man, with high estimation and observance by woman of the functions of motherhood and of The Home. While neglect of the home, contempt for and evasion of the duties of motherhood, immorality and general licence among their women characterised their downfall.

And comparing some modern developments with these records of Ruin, one can but be struck by notable resemblances between these latter and the present-day trend of all our greater civilisations.

In the decline of Rome, the Roman women went to two extremes. A tendency that shows increasingly among our modern womanhood. They separated into two main orders. "Blue-stocking" and "Rake," they were then designated. "Mannish" and "Womanish," or "Feminist" and "Ultra-Feminine," better characterise their latter-day presentments.

In America, these two orders of women are known as the "College" and the "Society" types, respectively. The "College" type makes a cult of masculinity of body and of brain. The "Society" type makes a cult of feminine graces and social accomplishments.

In the poorer, as in the superior classes of all nations, similar extremes are found. One order is virile and hard-working; and for the most part plain and moral. The other is womanish and pretty; and for the most part frail.

With us—as with those earlier peoples—the demand for liberty and unrestricted economic opportunities for women is occasioning contempt for and evasion of the functions of wife and of mother, emancipation from the home, increasing absorption in public affairs, fever for pleasure, lapse of womanly traditions and morale. All of which developments passed rapidly, in those others, into general laxity, licence and corruption; culminating finally in total ruin. With them, the claims of Home and of The Family became, as they are becoming more and more with us, secondary merely and subsidiary to other pursuits; to personal ambitions, public careers, to pleasures, excitements, crazes for notoriety. Woman's inherent erraticism—defect of her intrinsic spontaneity, her bent for novelty and strong sensation—degenerated, under the licence accorded her in ancient Rome, into the appalling orgies of The Bacchanalia; which were instituted by the sex.

Women attended the displays of gladiators. They watched the wild beasts tear their victims. They themselves dressed as gladiators, and held mimic combats. By cult of muscle, they grew taller than the men.

Sallust writes thus of a notorious Roman matron:

"Sempronia had committed many crimes of a boldness worthy of a man. Blest alike in family and beauty, in husband and children, she was well-read in Greek and Roman literature; could sing, play and dance more gracefully than any honest woman need; had many of the other accomplishments of a riotous life. She cared for nothing less than for decency and modesty."

Fifty years later, Seneca takes up the story of a rapid decadence: "The ladies do not reckon the years by the number of the Consuls, but by the number of their husbands."

Much the same licence, extravagance and viciousness of the sex characterised the greater number of those other old-world wreckages.

The higher Woman-attributes ceased to evolve; ceased to be exercised; ceased to inspire. Women cultivated solely, or pre-eminently, the male-side of their natures; muscle, intellect, ambition, concrete activities, indulgence of sex-instincts. By power of which masculine and alien proclivities, they increasingly dominated the men, in whom the virile traits had proportionally declined. Thus, more and more, the purifying, uplifting and inspiring potence of true Womanhood, together with the softening refinements of The Home, became ever further withdrawn from the national life. Thus corruption undermined; and chaos finally engulfed.

III

Things were different in Ancient Greece.

It has been said that Greece fell because she did not give her women liberty. For a time comes, in the development of every nation, when its women must be freed. Or decadence sets in inevitably. And some of those old civilisations declined, undoubtedly, from lack of progress in this respect.

It would seem that the first sips of liberty require to be administered to the sex with caution, however; the effects observed carefully, the doses increased warily. Otherwise, impulsive and impressionable as they are, women lose their heads; become intoxicated, and get out of hand. And once women get out of hand, it is next to impossible to bring them again under control (as was seen in the outbreaks of Feminist militancy). Civilisation forbids that men shall deal with them as with masculine rebels. And fenced thus behind the privileges of their own sex, when armed with the prerogatives of the other, they may prove dangerously difficult customers.

In ancient Greece, the wives and mothers and the other reputable women had but little or no freedom. They lived, for the most part, in seclusion; dull and unintelligent and uneventful lives. There was no pure, wholesome, and inspiring social life. The only women who were free were the hetairai, those famous ladies who shed a lurid brilliance over the corruption and decline of this great State—a decline wherewith they had, most certainly, much to do. A faction apart from the wives and mothers—although many among them were courtesans, they stood apart too from the courtesan class. Women who had found in the unfreed state of the wife and mother of their epoch, inadequate scope for their impulses and talents, they broke away from domestic conditions, to form a coterie of free lances—a cultured, brilliant and alluring band of renegades, sought and esteemed for their beauty and intelligence by all men; aristocrat, philosopher, and pleasure-seeker.

More likely than that Greece fell because she did not emancipate her women, it is that she fell because the women who emancipated themselves abandoned the rôles of wife, of mother, and other reputable functions. For these Grecian hetairai comprised, in the main, the flower of their generation. One sees them, indeed, as brilliant Racial poison-blossoms, greedily appropriating and exploiting to their own purposes the nation's beauty and the nation's talent, its aspirations, potence, passion—without transmitting any of these racial attainments to a later generation. In place of endowing their kind with such nobler light and faculty, inspiration and sweetness, as supply a people's evolutionary impulse, they abandoned the home and the sacred and spiritualising functions of true wifehood, and of the motherhood of such higher living types as are indispensable to lead a nation's progress.

A kindred movement—modified, for the present, by the more enlightened traditions of our Century—is foreshadowing itself across the higher civilisations of our day. More and more, our better types of women (the misinterpretations of the Feminist Movement having imparted a distorted bias and direction to their powers) are similarly abandoning the Home, or are withdrawing their best interests and talents from it; are evading wholly, or are gravely restricting their maternal obligations to the Race; regarding children as bye-products, merely, of life—vastly less important than some hobby or career. In place of realising the new generation as the Vanguard of Life and Evolution; that which beyond every other human achievement counts in the Universe.

Worse than this even, more and more, everywhere, women are failing in the maternal power of transmitting to offspring the health, the beauty, the abilities and aspirations which are the model and ideals of our age.

IV

A menace to the Race more alarming than that of the hard and mannish woman (who, because of her lack of womanly attractiveness, is debarred, in considerable degree, from marriage) is another and less ungraciously obvious deviation from The Normal—an order of the sex, modern and artificial, and rapidly increasing in number, over-civilised and highly-feminised both of physique and of temperament, which may be described as an Ultra-Feminine, or, in contradistinction to the Feminist, as a Feminist order.

Their womanhood but lightly rooted in neurotic systems, the women of this sect are unstable and erratic, seeking distraction for their restless, ill-balanced forces, in cards, crazes, drugs; fads and freaks. Unfitted for wifehood and motherhood—some by faulty heredity, but a far greater number by educational strain and consequent warp—some of these ultra-feminised and frequently interesting creatures absorb themselves feverishly in public movements; religious, social or political. Some are persons of irreproachable morale and ideals; devoted, gifted, wholly admirable. And being wives not seldom of men as talented, it is deplorable that warp of culture, unfitting them for motherhood, should have left such to waste their powers and aspirations in beating the thin air merely of Utopian propaganda. When, otherwise, they might have led the true and only way of Progress by endowing the Race with living presentments and evolving treasuries of the parental ideals and endowments.

The greater her charm, the nobler her character and talent, the more the pity is when woman is defective in the power to transmit her high qualities, or has power to transmit these in inferior degree only; thus sealing up for ever, or gravely impoverishing a vital spring of living faculty and individualism—a unique line of Human Ascent which no other stock can supply, and one which may have been leading up to the production of genius such as the world has not yet known.

Another—and quite different—sub-order of this neurotic (and partially-sterilised) type, in losing its higher potential of motherhood has lost the racial instinct wherein personal virtue is rooted. The lives of these are free and irregular. Not measures, but men, are their vogue; to serve as admirers of their charm and talents, as spectators of their temperamental extravagances. Incapable of the emotions of love, they seek, are discontented, and seek further when they do not find in its excitements, the joys and contentment that reside alone in deep and abiding emotions. The poise and repose, the charm, the refreshment and the inspiration of true Womanhood are lacking in them. They demand increasing novelty and change of venue for their ill-ballasted powers and capricious sensibilities. And this precisely in proportion as they are deficient in those womanly emotions and illusions which endue the least and simplest things with glamour and with beauty.

This type, which can scarcely be said to live, but merely to frolic through life, is pre-eminently dangerous to progress. Because, while possessing the psychology, the appeal and influence of women, some of these have cast off, utterly, the traditions, the nobler aspirations and the functions of the best womanhood.

V

It is universally admitted that a bad woman is far more wicked than a bad man is. She is more callous, ruthless, wanton and debased. The irresponsibility regarding concrete affairs (innate in a sex whereof The Concrete is only secondarily the province) makes her a dangerous and a demoralising factor when her acquired male brain and activities (for the clever, bad woman is always of masculine bent) over-ride her own natural aptitudes. Because the powers she has artificially acquired—in substitution for her native ones—do not alter her inherent constitution of a creature builded upon instincts; instincts which her native higher qualities are alone adequate to guide and inspire. One may acquire some of the characteristics of an opposite sex, but never the morale; which is inborn and inherent to the natural sex-characteristics.

Faculty declines in the inverse order of its development. The bloom and beauty of the peach and of the flower are the last things to come—and the first to go. So, in forfeiting her womanly qualities, woman forfeits earliest the best of these. Love and purity and spiritual aspiration perish first; with the result that the lower-grade female Subconscious emotionalism, instinct and palpitant with animal impulse, comes into play.

Man requires to degenerate to far inferior levels than is the case with woman, before he so loses his normal rationalism as to forfeit his sense of proportion and of his responsibility with regard to material affairs, and that stern obligation to conform to environmental conditions which has been the impelling force of male development. Irresponsibility is in him an acquired—and a feminine—defect; not an inherent failing of his sex. The very basis of the manly character is a recognition of the male responsibility in life's affairs. It was the impulse of man's primal struggle. It is the mark of his civilised manhood.

Irresponsibility is, on the contrary, innate in woman. It is part of that spontaneity, plasticity, and versatility which have engendered the racial evolutionary mutations; and by way of these have engendered the progressive transitions to ever higher forms. And indispensable as her native mutability is in making her the agency of evolutionary change, it is an insecure and a dangerous basis for too heavy a super-structure of male characteristics, physical or mental; as also for too heavy a burden of male responsibilities. It disqualifies her for liberty and scope of action identical with man's, in material affairs.

The further we fit her, moreover (beyond her normal capacity), for such affairs, by artificially equipping her with masculine aptitudes, the more we unfit her for her evolutionary rôle of spontaneous advance. Her chiefest values lie in the spring and the plasticity which enable her to adapt her nature to the evolutionary impulses of life inherent in her; and thereby to engender further human evolution. For this, it is important that she shall not be moulded on those firmer and more definitely prescribed lines of masculine development which are indispensable to the pioneering of material progress. Nor should her powers be equally differentiated, or similarly expended. They must be left, in far greater degree, conserved, unformulate and unadapted.

Normally, she is the child of Nature, in whom (because she is the mother of the human child, who shapes to the maternal model) Nature is unfolding the type of our Perfecting Humanity. She should remain, therefore, more or less in the native and spontaneously fructifying state conducive to evolutionary unfoldment. When she adapts as closely to concrete conditions as it is imperative for man to do, not only does she exhaust the potential fertility indispensable to the further evolution and growth of racial faculty, but her powers lose that mode of flux which enables them to tide to higher levels.

While man stands for Civilisation, woman stands for Nature. Generatrix of Life, she is instinct with vital impulses. And when these are not expended, as is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living and beloved beings, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic aberrations. Because, no matter to what degree she may acquire masculine characteristics and aptitudes, she remains, at core, a creature of instinct; not of reason. As a creature of instinct she is invaluable to life—because Life is moulded upon instinct. But instinct and rationalism function on different planes of mentality. To over-develop rationalism in her is to quench emotionalism in her, and the higher illumination of her Supra-conscious faculties; thus rendering her the prey of smouldering subconscious impulses which burst fitfully and mischievously into flame.

For Progress, man must be always the leading half and controller in politics and civic affairs. These are his province. His sex stands for permanence and conformity—and, accordingly, for uniformity. And uniformity is the model for Civilisation, making as it does for justice and the common good.

Woman's non-conformability adapts her admirably to the personal relations of life, but not to the political. Man builds institutions and administers them by more or less rigid impersonal rule. Woman transforms them into homes, and humanises them by individual concessions and exceptions.

So the two are supplement and complement in the public as in the natural sphere. But their respective rôles are contrary in every mode and issue. Man's conformity, political and civic, is continually leavened by the element of non-conformity and change he inherits from his mother, with her other Woman-traits. But in him, her spontaneity and impulse are so intelligised and stabilised by his masculine rationalism and bent for order that, in place of operating emotionally and spasmodically, they become tempered and restrained. Under his administration, material advance proceeds slowly, but surely and securely. His masculine intelligence and sense of responsibility cause him to adjust the maternal evolutionary impulses,—which he inherits as reformatory and revolutionary impulses—to the exigencies of practicability, and the requirements of circumstance.

VI

There is no more difficult, or possibly mischievous, person than a strong and clever woman whose over-developed masculine energies and abilities are controlled neither by a man's reason and sense of responsibility, nor by a woman's natural disabilities, affections and restraints. She is sometimes prodigiously clever; adding to her male talents a woman's fertility, versatility, adaptability, complexity and intuitiveness. And yet with all their gifts, such women accomplish little but harm—alike to themselves and others.

Erratic, fickle, irrepressible, they are perpetually flying off at tangents. Now they are one thing too much. Now they are the opposite—in an equal extreme.

Medleys of contradictions and perversities, they are no sooner repressed in one direction, or become fatigued by the monotony of any single line of action, than they burst forth in some other. Their abnormal mentality and energy, allied to their innate impulsiveness and craving for change, impel them to break loose from those bonds of affection, of tradition and of aspiration, which are woman's safeguards. There is in the nature of most women, this dangerous quicksand of irresponsibility, which may, in crises, topple and submerge the soundest structure of education and of habit builded over it. This is seen in the abandon and anarchy of the sex in riots and in revolutions.

Such women rebels become increasingly a law unto themselves, and see no reason why all others should not do likewise. They lack the masculine grip of concrete principles to recognise that general lawlessness and individual liberty cannot co-exist. Because where every man is free to do as he pleases, no man is free to do as he pleases, owing to some other man's abuse of his liberty encroaching on that of his neighbours.

Women of this order are the Cleopatras, Agrippinas, Messalinas and the Catharines of Russia; the de Pompadours, de Staëls, Georges Sands, and the innumerable other self-centred, unconscionable female-egotists whose extravagances shriek discordant down the ages.

Lacking both a woman's morals and a man's ethics, they are freaks of Nature; or are Frankensteins of abnormal culture. When they are not Empresses, to indulge in shameful licence—their male abilities exaggerating their woman-instincts to the dimensions of megalomanias—their inordinate ambitions make them mistresses of crowned heads, or of others whose rank or wealth supplies their mistresses with means and scope for their unbridled prodigalities. Privileged by their sex and by masculine favour, their lawlessness protected from its merited penalties by the law-abiding of their fellows, they become intoxicated—frequently insane—as result of their successes and excesses. The famous courtesans have been (and are still) for the most part women of this ilk; persons of steel brain and will, without a woman's aspirations or emotions to soften their self-centredness; nor a man's code to discipline their wantonness. They make men the instruments and the victims of their feminine defects, which are all—or nearly all—of woman they possess; self-consciousness distorted to a monstrous vanity, emotions dwarfed to greeds and lusts.

One after another, they exploit their victims, by exercise, precisely, of the same masculine business-abilities and ruthlessness which make men fraudulent company-promoters, profiteers, or sweaters of the poor. When one has served their purpose, they cast him off for another. Cold-blooded, clever, and emotionless, although sometimes sensual in a fashion purely male (in keeping with their other male proclivities) they are adventuresses, spies, poisoners, adultresses, monsters; abiding reproach to a noble sex; terrible example of the fate awaiting that sex, as penalty for abnormal development of masculine characteristics beyond the capacity of its Woman-traits to counterpoise and guide.

Power, which strengthens and steadies all but weak men, only too often drives women to destruction. A factor in this is that those privileges of their sex which have become, more or less, their civilised prerogative, preserve them from the salutary harsh and stern rebuffs which men in like circumstance inevitably encounter.

If women are to have scope and authority identical with men's, then they must forgo all privileges; must come out from their fence behind strong arms and chivalry to meet masculine blows in the face, economic and ethical—if not actual, indeed, as Prévost has predicted.

And then, Heaven help them—and men—and the Race!

CHAPTER II

THE EVOLUTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE

"I am for you and you are for me,

Not only for your own sake, but for others' sakes,

Envelop'd in you, sleep great heroes and bards,

They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me."

Walt Whitman.

I

A French biologist has discovered that when a female oyster is starved, and its constitution thus deteriorated, it becomes transformed into a male.

The male oyster must be inferior, therefore, in organisation to the female. Its constitutional potential is less, since the constitutional potential of the female contains both its own, and the potential of the male. And the lesser, it is admitted, cannot contain the greater; although higher evolutionary forms, when subjected to conditions which preclude them from sustaining these their higher forms, may lapse to modes less complex.

Further and more striking examples of such Sex-transformation are afforded by so-called "mules," or "neuters," which occur in other species. A well-known case is that of a pea-hen belonging to Lady Tynte. Having laid eggs from which chicks were raised, this pea-hen, after moulting, developed feathers proper to the other sex; appearing like a pied peacock. In the third year the same phenomenon occurred in her; she developed spurs, moreover, resembling those of the cock. She never bred after this change in her plumage.

As already mentioned, kindred phenomena of sex-metamorphosis are observed in women after operations involving removal of reproductive glands.

That the female is, indeed, a more complex order of organisation than the male, is not to be doubted, since masculine characteristics emerge from it when it lapses from its normal of condition.

Adolescence as it occurs in the boy and in the girl emphasises this conclusion.

To the age of twelve or thereabouts, the normal boy- and girl-child are like enough to one another; smooth-skinned, active, simple creatures. The boy is, normally, larger, sturdier, stronger and rougher than the girl. But, save for the cut of their hair and of their clothes, the two are very similar.

With the transition to manhood and womanhood, respectively, notable differences accrue, however.

From having been a strong, young, active, boy-like creature, now—provided her development be allowed to take the normal course—the girl loses physical activity and strength. A phase of invalidation sets in. Instinctively, she no longer runs and romps. New languors invest her in mind and in body. She is indisposed to brain-work or to much exertion. She lounges and muses. Her mind is clouded with the mists of awakening sensibilities. She suffers from lassitudes.

She becomes a complex of disabilities, indeed; disabilities which in delicate, sickly or over-taxed girls, show in chlorosis, anæmia, hysteria and other ills. Obviously, profound changes, with re-adjustments of her constitutional resources, are taking place in her. And most significant of these is that which shows like an arrest of development, physical and intellectual. Because, normally, she develops but little further along direct lines of intellect and muscle. Yet that she is still developing, and this upon wholly new—subtler, higher and more complex lines, is manifest at the end of this transition-period whence she emerges, a woman.

Her developmental arrest and her disabilities (resulting from an intensification of Recessive processes in her) are seen now to have subserved a phase of higher evolution. Nature suddenly locked the door upon her differentiating and escaping energies, in order that these might be conserved and knit into organisation. The active muscularity she has lost reappears in the new factors of symmetry and delicate modelling of limb; in repose and grace of movement. The straight, slim, boy-like lines of the hoyden girl have evolved into the curves and rounded suppleness and beauties of a woman. The girlish, agile and abrupt movements have passed into a woman's poise and grace. The unformed features of the child have become now delicately modelled; the curveless, emotionless lips have bloomed into the flower-like, rosy fullness of a woman's mouth; passionate and tender. New mystery and brilliance light her eyes. Eyes and brows are charged with potencies; with seriousness, with modesty, serenity, elusiveness. Hair and hands, voice and expression, have become transfigured by the magic of a re-creative impulse which has regenerated her whole being.

So too her brain development, arrested along lines of concrete intellection, is seen to have evolved to higher, subtler forms of mentality; to be instinct with delicacy, sympathy, tact, and with that incalculable mode of supra-conscious cerebration which is intuition. In so far as she is of high, womanly type, she is now warm and emotional, sympathetic, intuitive; consciously pure, yet delicately passionate. From a crude and sexless hoyden, she has evolved into an exquisite complexity; invested all round with higher values, human and psychical.

As in their earliest beginnings, however, so now again the Woman-traits manifest as Unfitnesses. Her new departure has actually undone in her much that had been achieved in physical adaptation.

Biologists, observing this arrest of development in the female, have interpreted it as sign of an organisation inferior to that of the male. In point of fact, the contrary is the case. Her arrest of development along lines of masculine inherence no more proves her inferior to the male than does the human developmental arrest along lines of that tail our ape-progenitor possessed, prove the human inferior to the ape-species.

This arrest of tail-development occurred first in the female, doubtless; being one of those evolutionary mutations in the direction of advance of Type which are engendered in her sex; and which are characterised by a conversion to higher potential, of differentiations in respect of adaptation to environment that have been achieved in the male. Conversion of male Fitness to female Unfitness, therefore.

Seeing that the ape is vastly more adapted than is man to natural environment, it is obvious that the trend of adaptation to environment, far from having been along lines of evolving ape to man, must have been always, on the contrary, impelling reversion of the human to the ape-type. Darwin relates how he and Huxley, watching some boys bathing, "marvelled over the fact, seeming especially strange when they are no longer disguised by clothes, that human beings should dominate over all other creatures and play the wonderful part they do on earth."

Hugo de Vries says: "Natural Selection (whereof Adaptation is modus operandi) ... does not single out the best variations, but simply destroys the larger number of those which are, from some cause or other, unfit for their present environment. In this way it keeps the strains up to the required standard."

While Hoffding states explicitly: "Adaptation and Progress are not the same."

Clearly there are Dual Principles operating in progressive development; one adapting the organism to environment, the other adapting it to the Typal model inherent in species.

II

In the male of stock impoverished by artificial conditions of civilisation, the transition to manhood is attended likewise by some languors, physical and mental. New powers are being developed and occasion more or less strain upon the constitution—a strain wherewith our present-day masters and pastors, in their zeal of intensive culture, reckon far too little. In healthy boys this is in no way comparable, however, with the constitutional stress which adolescence causes in healthy girls. The youth continues to wax in strength of brain and body. The arrest, or involution, normal to the girl, does not occur in him.

While she becomes gentler and more tranquil, by reason of a new poise in her of mind and body, he becomes forceful and restless by reason of a new release in him of energy. Yet though he gains in strength of brain and body by this further differentiation of his resources into concrete faculty and virile energy, he lapses notably in organisation. From the supple, fine-skinned boy—clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, womanly almost in refinement and comeliness—he grows large and hard and muscular; more or less sinewy and rough-hewn, according as he is, or is not, manly of type. His skin loses its fine grain and smoothness, becoming coarser and hirsute; thus reverting, in degree, to the inferior, animal grade of skin. His voice falls nearly an octave, lapsing from sweetness and purity to gruffness and volume. Obviously—although all this being normal, the male has a virile charm and handsomeness of his own—man's is notably a less highly and subtly-evolved organisation than is woman's.

In the boy, is seen a progressive adaptation of body and brain to environment, in order to fit him for his man's task of coping with and advancing the conditions of life, material and ethical. And for this, the more delicate and sensitive woman-physique, demanding more of vital conservation for its upkeep, would be a handicap.

Biological adaptation for his part in reproduction occurs too. But the male development at this epoch is pre-eminently one of adaptation to environment; equipping him with bone and muscle, brain and enterprise, aggressiveness, initiative and energy. Racially indispensable as the reproductive function is in him, it is obviously incidental and subordinate to his general development.

The girl's transition to womanhood is seen, on the contrary, to be one almost entirely of adaptation, physiological and psychical, to the functions of wifehood and child-bearing. Her growth ceases. She loses, in place of gaining, nerve and muscle-power. While, in becoming emotional, her changed mentality unfits far more than it fits her to cope with life at first hand; with life unadapted, that is, and herself unshielded by the male. Her intelligence at eighteen is normally less keen and active—although of higher and more subtle quality and trend—than it had been at twelve.

Indications of Nature which point unmistakably to diametrically different modes of culture and of training for the sexes, and, in consequence, to wholly different applications of their respective powers and aptitudes in every department of life.

In the boy, the Male-traits receive, with adolescence, a great influx of energy; wholly dominating the Woman-traits which had made him more or less a feminine creature.

More and more each day, the potential virile in his every cell asserts itself in structure and in function; dominating the Woman-traits inherent in him. He waxes big and strong of body; restless and active of mentality. And the less, within normal limits, virility has been prematurely forced in him by too hard strain of mind or body, the better for the evolution of his manhood. Unless the Woman-traits have been unduly drilled and hardened out of him, they will now refine, inspire and fructify his awakening masculine powers. The too hard struggle for existence put, by necessity, on boys of the poorer classes, and, in the higher classes, forced on sensitive boys called upon, too young, to fight for survival in the semi-savage communities that public schools are, hardens them too soon and too summarily, and thus frustrates their best development.

It is said that there is no atrocity a boy-community will not commit.

In this stage of development, the moral consciousness of the genus is at low ebb. The accentuation of Male-traits now occurring occasions a recrudescence of primal instincts. And the collective atmosphere such recrudescence engenders in a boy-community, marooned in school-life apart from the refining, softening influences of home and womenkind, is only too often an evil and a demoralising one. Boarding-schools should be abolished; good day-schools substituted.

More than at any other phase of his existence, the masculine needs now the Woman-influences from without; because the Woman-traits within are, for a period, submerged beneath a surge of Maleness.

Notwithstanding these obvious truths, however, during the years when body and mind should be adapting gradually, consciously and subconsciously, to the social environment wherein their lives are to be passed; when the mental horizon should be expanding simultaneously with the expanding intelligence, when the moral should be rising to the new demands upon it, boys are imprisoned in scholastic institutions, where they are hemmed in by routine and restrictions, in an atmosphere of puerile conceptions, puerile traditions, puerile conventions and associations; their chief outlet and respite the narrow rules and the narrowing absorptions of so-called "Games," supervised by martinet Games-masters.

And then, when we bring them to the field of life, we are surprised to find many of them unintelligent, unadapted, unadaptable; resourceless, inept and incompetent. Cooped during those impressionable years in a wholly artificial environment, when confronted by the world of living actualities, which is not ruled by similar narrow restrictions, nor shaped upon the artificial forms and puerile misconceptions in which their young ductile natures have been run and have set—they show themselves wholly unfitted for life, with its varied, difficult and complex conditions and adjustments. They have become, in point of fact, mentally and temperamentally "provincial."

The good form which some of them acquire is derived less from school-ethics or training than from an aristocratic strain of boys with whom they have been associated. And being acquired, when it is not the form of their own social order, it appears only too frequently as a counterfeit; engendering insincerity and snobbishness, and marring individuality.

It has seemed to me that, in both sexes, the first seven years of life—during which native faculty and attribute are evolving at great pace—are a phase in which the Recessive, or anabolic, mode, conservative of the resources and vitalising of the tissues, is in the ascendant. The true child of both sexes is normally, during these years, a typification of the Woman-traits; receptive, plastic, gentle, affectionate, trustful, intuitive, emotional; quickly fatigued, quickly recuperative; more or less lovely and angelic. In this phase, native intuitive faculty makes children sometimes phenomenal; lightning calculators, musical prodigies, precocious poets, artists. So too, their marvellously rapid apprehension of the complex meanings and implications of life betokens Supra-conscious mentality.

At seven years old and thence onward to fourteen, a male, and katabolic, phase sets in. Phenomenal faculty vanishes. Concrete development of body, brain and energy proceeds apace. The child becomes active, intelligent, enterprising, inquiring. The boy becomes appreciably male; the girl more or less of a hoyden, more male, indeed, than she is normally at any other period of her existence. Unless, that is, this hoyden phase is rendered permanent in her by masculine training.

At fourteen, with the evolution of sex, the sex of boy and girl, with its respective opposite modes of constitution and of function, makes for marked development, each along its characteristic lines.

III

The French have a saying: La femme est une malade. Woman is not, of course, an invalid. Nature does not fashion invalids. Woman's organisation is normally delicate and sensitive and highly strung, because of its special and complex sex-differentiation. She resembles the child, in that howsoever healthful (in proportion, indeed, as she is normal and healthfully organised) her cells of brain and body re-act resiliently and vitally to all the agencies, physical and psychical, about her.

This sensitive re-activity is not only a sign, it is, as well, a source of health. Because the greater delicacy and sensitiveness of organisation which characterise women and children, resulting in their quick re-activity to deleterious conditions, secure a permanently more highly-vitalised condition of body than is the case with man, whose cells are less sensitive, more tolerant of fatigue, of cold, and of other injurious agents. Immunity against injurious factors is the parent of degeneracy. Life being re-activity, in terms of living processes, to the factors of environment, such immunity entails loss of vital re-activity to vivifying as much as against deteriorative factors.

We complain that Nature, in place of making our bodies of cast iron, so to speak, makes them, on the contrary, vulnerable at every point. The reason is, surely, that the less we are constituted like cast iron—the more vital and complex, intelligent and responsive, our tissues are, accordingly—the more conducive to change and advance (because the more sensitively re-active to subtler and psychical stimuli) they are likewise. We cannot be, at the same time, hardy and obtuse, yet exquisitely sensitive. Living tissue-cells are characterised, beyond all other developments, by a range of contrasting abilities. An arm serves as softest cushion for a child's head, or, by stiffening of its muscles, becomes rigid as steel. An eye that sees for miles will focus to a pin-point. But being, as we are, still in the making, our tissues necessarily have limitations—and the defects, accordingly, of both their sets of qualities. High sensitiveness of function is necessarily attended by corresponding complexity and delicacy of structure. Such structural delicacy obliges us to adapt environment to its complexities. It is thus an incentive to progress.

It obliges us, as well, to moderate our activities, and, by thus restricting the output of our cruder powers, our resources are husbanded and directed into higher channels.

The purpose of the complex differentiations which handicap the adolescent girl is obvious. The curving bones, the expanding pelvis, the rounded contours, the inhibited muscles, the languors and recurring disabilities, are designed to restrict activity, physical and mental.

Physicists tell us that the Conservation of Motion and the Conservation of Energy are one and the same thing. This must be true, as well, of Vital Energy. The conservation of Vital Activity subtends the Conservation of Vital resources. The new developments are by no means incidental merely to the new processes; they are an integral part of The Plan. In half-closing the doors on avenues of active output, Nature conserves the Woman-powers for more intrinsic use. Every brain and body-cell is raised thereby to higher levels both of constitution and of function.

As stored mechanical energy becomes transformed into the higher form of electrical energy, so the power stored in Woman's anabolic cells is raised to higher evolutionary forms. Thus she becomes fitted to be mother of the Child—the blossom of the Race. Her part in the child will contain the inherence of these new higher evolutionary values, as the father's part in it will contain the inherence of the concrete powers he has developed. And while her body spontaneously raises all its issues in order to fit her to be a Mother, so it develops powers and functions adapting her to serve as soft environment, physical and attributal, for the rearing of her child.

All this complex differentiation and evolution are designed, as well, to adapt woman for the love-passion, and to draw and bind her mate to her. And Nature has so cunningly interwoven the two plans and the two developments that, for the most part, those physical traits and emotional attributes which best qualify for motherhood most potently attract and closely attach the woman's mate to her.

Woman is "une malade," because, throughout the more than thirty years of her potential maternity, she suffers periodically those which, biologically speaking, are minor childbirths; each entailing a cycle of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerable constitutional and nervous stress, debility and incapacitation. Nature exacts from her this recurring toll to Life and to the Race, not only to preserve in her, in healthful and efficient function, the power and mechanism of actual child-bearing, but (only second in importance) perpetually to recruit her emotional womanhood and wifehood.

When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs may follow constitutional strain or undue effort.

Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another.

Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty whereon mental and moral stability depend.

* * * * *

The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that exacted of the female.

IV

It is because of their anabolic mode of tissue-cells, less wasteful upon the material plane, that girls and women normally require less food than boys and men do. Notwithstanding that their bodies are more highly nourished than are those of males. Healthy young women continue to be plump and pretty, healthful and active on bread-and-butter, fruits and sweetmeats. While mannish women, whose physiology has deteriorated to the katabolic, disruptive and forceful, male mode, possess frequently the hungry appetites of men; not only for food but for drink. And yet withal, they are lean and for the most part plain, and poorly nourished.

With the wane in her of the anabolic mode of cellular conservation, and the release thereby of vital resources which, sealed up in her tissue-cells at adolescence, remain invested in organisation during her years of possible motherhood, woman in whom sex is not highly developed reverts more or less (as does the constitutionally-deteriorated oyster) to the masculine type. She lapses to a katabolic metabolism.

At middle-age, accordingly, provided she be still healthy, she derives a considerable accession of energy, physical and intellectual. Now for the first time relieved of the Life-tax upon her resources, her powers are released from bond, and become more fully available for individuation and personal activity.

At the same time, with this conversion of constitutional investment to the form of current and available energy, there occurs a proportional—sometimes a very signal—impoverishment of organisation; and, after a phase of recrudescent emotionalism, a cooling and thinning of passional feeling. Because such realisation of invested vital capital is inevitably the precursor of decline. Thenceforward her cells, no longer sustaining their high evolutionary states, generate more of concrete energy, and endow her with increased powers of action. But their conditional deterioration is manifest in general deterioration of physique, of looks, and frequently of health.

Not seldom, indeed, when her constitutional reserves had been previously depleted by over-expenditure, physical or mental, the cell-deterioration of this epoch lapses to serious disease or disability; to rheumatism, gout, cancer or other perverted forms.

With the constitutional and biological changes come psychical changes too. In women in whom sex is not highly-specialised, middle-age entails, with its quasi-masculine physical phase, quasi-masculine mental traits. They may become strenuous and combative, sometimes difficult and domineering. Perhaps they attach themselves to political and ethical "anti"-movements, as arena for their new combativeness, their augmented intellection, and increased physical activity.

In the most womanly of women also (as in men at a later epoch) there occurs at this period a natural transposition of the parental traits of Altruism and Chivalry to the impersonal plane; moving them to mother and father the world in general, by way of Charity, Philanthropy, Reform.

V

Is it not waste of power and faculty, is asked, for able and cultured women to permit their development, physical and mental, to adapt to the simple requirements of a nursery?

Uncultured and more or less brainless women of an inferior class, it is said, should be adequate, surely, to cope with the minds and the needs of these immature beings.

Immature they are, in truth. But they are nevertheless strangely complex; exquisitely sensitive. And they are men and women in the making—or the marring. Behind the eyes of any child that looks at you in dumb and wistful impotence to express itself, to defend itself, to provide and to care for itself, may lie the mind, in bud, of a Shakespeare, of a Newton, of a Shelley; of a Florence Nightingale, a Mrs. Somerville, a Charlotte Brontë.

How the most ordinary child, indeed, of cultured parents suffers acutely in feeling, and deteriorates in mind and character under the regime of blundering rebuffs, scoldings and misapprehensions, he meets at every turn in the nursery ruled by a crude, hard woman of the labouring classes!

How, when they have grown older in years but are still only young in understanding, all youth suffers from the shallow motherhood that was kind, maybe, and helpful to it in its childhood, but fails it utterly in the stress and difficulties of its teens!

True motherhood is the greatest of the Creative Arts; Mother-craft, the most vital and complex of the Sciences. Life has never received more than a tithe of that which Nature destined for it, owing to lack of mother-nurture. Genius has never fruited to full bloom and potence, because the mothers have so seldom realised the greatness of their task.

Nearly all the records of childhood that writers have given us are annals of bewildered mental suffering and of moral torture, which have left their evil mark in injured health or warped mentality—not seldom in both.

The home, with all the intuitive wisdoms, the powers and sympathies and the maternal ministry of a true mother, is indispensable to the nurture of Individualism, and thereby to the evolution of human character and faculty.

The true home is the temple of the soul. Souls are exquisitely sensitive, infinitely shy. And only in the warm and fostering atmosphere of kindred beings do they find courage to unfold in living attribute. Every home should be a unique environment, pre-eminently specialised and adapted to the evolution of the young and tender nursling-individualities shaping in it. To uproot these prematurely from their native soil and transplant them in an alien one, is to blight nascent talent and to warp character. For the reason that it necessitates too early individuation, with precocious development of self-protective and other qualities of worldly expedience.

To plant out the shivering, exquisitely sensitive seedling, the human Babe, in the chill, communal atmosphere of a Crèche or other institution, is as inhuman a social crime as it is an inhuman social crime to defraud its mother of her highest evolutionary impulse and function in the nurture of her little one—a responsibility she has incurred, a privilege she has earned by right of her maternity.

In her nursery, the mind of woman opens new windows of illumination, glimpses new vistas of thought and emotion, higher and lovelier apprehensions of the profounder meanings of Life. In her nursery, her eyes learn tenderness, her voice sweet modulation, her speech new purity and fondness.

In good and happy homes where young persons, in place of being banished to schools, grow up in the natural bracing and inspiring atmosphere of parental influence and affection, Sex evolves new issues, in those attractions and sympathies of its Contrasting Traits which are evoked by the relations of mother and son, of father and daughter, of brother and sister.

Under modern conditions, in which children and young persons renew intermittent acquaintance merely with parents and brothers and sisters during brief holiday visits—returning home, with every added term of absence, more and more strangers to their kin, their personalities and interests increasingly detached from those of the home circle—such potent and inspiring developments of sex are vanishing.

A wide gulf, truly, separates from their fathers these modern self-centred, self-opinionated young sportswomen and over-academised girls. The charming filial relation, engendering new and tender sex-amenities in the daughter's hero-worship and reliance on the manhood of her sire, in the father's protective chivalry and recruital of his youth in the company and interests of his young daughter, is waning toward extinction. The vast majority of fathers feel dismally constrained, indeed, and out of countenance in the presence of their girls—so smart and sophisticated, so superior, critical and self-sufficing are our latter-day school and college-maidens. For the most part, their own daughters are the last among womenkind to whom men turn, to reap something of the freshness and fairness of the younger generation they have sown and laboured for.

While the up-to-date mother aspires to no higher or more beautiful place in her boy's life and affections than that of "good chum!"

CHAPTER III

THE EXTINCTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE

"We may outrun,

By violent swiftness, that which we run at,

And lose by over-running."

Shakespeare.

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.

CHAPTER IV

THE WOMAN BRAIN: ITS POWERS AND DISABILITIES

"My state is like the lightning's light—

Now it shines forth, and now 'tis gone from sight.

At times, amid the heavens I find my seat;

At others, I am lower than my feet."

Sa'di (Persian poet).

I

Of what order is this Woman-half of Mind which Feminism seeks to extinguish?

* * * * *

The cerebral processes appreciable upon the Outer plane, and calculable by Science, represent no more than a tithe of brain-activities. They are but a single highly-specialised focus of brain-functioning.

Behind concrete Volition, Intellection, and Action, are the silent, ceaseless, inner and incalculable workings of innumerable brain-cells concerned with the mysterious constitution and metabolism of Life, and its strange, potent relation and correlation with Mind and with environment; concerned with character and attribute and impulse; with ancestral vestiges and personal experience; with memories and instincts; with an infinitude of occulted and imperishable records of previous terrestrial existences, perhaps; concerned, in a word, with all the secret springs and complex potences of Individuality; which differentiates every thought, emotion and action of any human person from those of every other.

And in these recondite mysteries fructifying in a hundred million bi-sexual brain-cells, it may be that the subtle counter and inter-operations of the Man and Woman-traits find their highest activities, and make for their supremest issues.

Every man and woman is to every other a Sealed Book, whereof no more than a few pages have been glimpsed—even by those nearest and dearest. We are Sealed Books to ourselves, indeed, because we do not know the language we are written in. For of all the muted mysteries spinning ceaselessly within the silent-functioning cells of twin brain-hemispheres, Science affords us but the scantest and most sketchy information. That the grey matter coating the brain-convolutions is the site of mentality; that the higher the intelligence, the deeper and more intricate these convolutions are; that disease of a certain area destroys the power of speech; while disease of some other occasions paralysis of this or that group of muscles, loss of sensation in this or that tract of skin. Baldly it states that a portion of a certain convolution controls a certain movement of a hand. But the thousand and one emotions and incentives prompting such movement, and differentiating the resulting action across the extensive range between the noblest benefaction and the blackest murder, baffle every scientific method.

The processes of Mind and Impulse occur on planes we have no means of penetrating, possess no appliances whereby to estimate the ethereal undulations thereof.

What are we? Who are we? Whence are we? Whither do we go?

All is locked within the occulted silence of our hundred million brain-cells; each of which holds and keeps its own intrinsic secret; each the mysterious record, it may be, of one of those countless experiences, forms and phases, ancestral or individual, whereof every living person is the last resultant. But the Twin-hemispheres, face to face within the skull, like opposite pages of a book, are key to one another; one page written in the mystical language of The Past and Future, the other in the concrete language of The Present.

II

Is that which I surmise to be the Woman—and emotional half of brain, the site of the mysterious province known as The Subconsciousness, into the strange powers and phenomena whereof scientists are now beginning to inquire?

Is it the seat of that which Myers designated "The Subliminal Consciousness," but which might well be called the Supra-Consciousness, because, in the regions of its higher functioning, it cognises things beyond power of Concrete Consciousness to apprehend; intuitions, premonitions, apparitions, telepathic messages?

Is it medium of those inherences and that sub-intelligent emotionalism known as Instinct; which may be regarded as the implanted religion of rudimentary organisms, leading them upward in blind subconscious obedience, at sacrifice of their self-interests and disposition?

Respecting the regeneration of the crystalline lens of the eye of a Triton, Bergson says:

"Whether we will or no, we must appeal to some inner directing principle in order to account for this convergence of effects."

May it not be that this brain-half—seemingly functionless, albeit as marvellously constructed and constituted as its fellow-half—is, in its merely organic departments, the agency of such an "inner principle," engendering the vital potentials of Life and Evolution, of health, of nervous recuperation and of biological repair? While in its departments of Mind, it functions as instinct, as intuition, as inspiration, aspiration; serves as the subtly receptive medium by way of which The Divine Influx wells in human attribute; whereby Divine Revelation is communicated to the concrete brain-half, for interpretation in speech and in writing. Bergson says also: "The consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and realised activity. It measures the interval between representation and action." (Duality is indicated.)

The trait essentially distinguishing the human from the brute-mind, is Intelligent Purpose. And Purpose is the product of Impulse (or Instinct) and Reason, (or Concrete Intelligence). (Duality again.) Impulse is an emotion and is feminine. Reason is masculine. Intelligent Purpose may well be, therefore, a resultant of the co-operation of the feminine half of the brain, which supplies Impulse, with the masculine half, which supplies Reason.

Instinct, Professor James, the American psychologist, has pointed out, exists independently of any recognition of its purpose. While Reason exists apart from instinct—apart therefore from the emotional impulse which gives it the personal motive-power to become purpose. Thus, either mode of brain without the other to supplement it would be incapable of function.

Self-consciousness requires two departments of Consciousness—each of which is aware of the other. So that a man may judge and restrain impulses in himself that are contrary to reason and expedience, or, on the other hand, may choose to sacrifice both reason and self-interest to emotional impulse, noble and uplifting, or ignoble and debasing.

Describing Intellect as characterised by a natural inability to comprehend Life, Professor Bergson further says: "Instinct, on the contrary, is moulded on the very form of Life.... If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of Life."

Again Duality of mental processes is inferred. As too in the following passage:

"Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations—just as intelligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into Matter.... Intelligence, by means of science ... brings us, and moreover only claims to bring us, a translation of Life in terms of inertia.... But it is to the very inwardness of Life that Intuition leads us—by Intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely."

III

The phenomena of Hypnotism seem to set the Duality of cerebral processes beyond dispute.

Dr. George H. Savage, Consulting Physician and late Lecturer on Mental diseases at Guy's Hospital, in his Harveian Oration, October 1909, testified as follows to the strangeness and authenticity of hypnotic evidences:

"Wishing to follow our great master in not accepting anything without personal investigation, I took advantage of the opportunity offered by Dr. Wright, to test some of the points of most importance to which I have referred.

"A gentleman, an engineer, who had been relieved by treatment by Dr. Wright, was willing to allow him to demonstrate the various stages of hypnotism and their effects.... He was asked to sit down and talk quietly about his relationship to hypnotism. Then he was told to go to sleep. A few passes being made over his head, he slowly closed his eyes, and in less than a minute he was sleeping placidly. By the gentle stroking of his left arm this was rendered inflexible. The pulse was in no way affected; pupils were equal, but rather larger than before he slept, and were sluggish. He was slowly aroused (it being well always to recall the subject slowly). After a talk on general matters he stated that he had no sense of fatigue in the arm, nor any recollection of anything said and done during the period of hypnosis.

"He was again, in a similar way, sent to sleep. It was then suggested that at the end of seven minutes he should lose all power and sensibility in his right side. He was roused, given a cigarette, which he smoked while he talked, having no knowledge of the suggestion which had been made. About five minutes after he had been roused, his right arm fell useless by his side, he passing at the same time into a partial stage of hypnosis. This is common when a post-hypnotic suggestion is being carried out. The whole of the right side, including the face, was insensitive; the pupils were smaller and inactive. He was again slowly aroused, and resumed smoking, having no feeling of oppression, or recollection of anything which had been said or done. He was later again hypnotised, and in that condition he was asked what had been done formerly. After some hesitation, he, in part, recalled the facts.

"It is interesting to note that though constantly the acts performed during hypnosis are not recalled when awake, they are fully remembered on a second hypnosis. We tested his emotional side by getting him to recall scenes in a comic opera, at which he heartily laughed but had no knowledge of on waking. While unconscious, it was suggested that when he woke he should remark upon a strong odour of violets. He was awakened and offered a cigarette; but, looking about the room, he asked whence the strong smell of violets came.

"I inquired as to the revival of long-past impressions, and it seems that occurrences which took place before his present memory existed, had been revived and verified. But still more interesting was his experience in reference to a mathematical formula which he had forgotten. Being hypnotised, he dictated it, and though when once more awake he did not remember it, when shown what he had just dictated he recognised it as the lost formula. This, of course, is in a way parallel to the solution of difficult problems during sleep."

Be it observed that when at the end of seven minutes (as had been "suggested" to him should happen) the subject lost all power and sensibility in his right side and "his right arm fell useless by his side," he passed "at the same time into a partial state of hypnosis. This is common," Dr. Savage adds, "when a post-hypnotic suggestion is being carried out."

Here is strong corroboration of my argument that the right side of the body, with its allied half-brain, is the agent of Material Consciousness, of muscular action and of physical sensation, and that it operates normally in fencing in the higher faculties of Mind from the outer plane of concrete happenings, as also of interpreting them upon this plane.

Hypnosis is induced by devices occasioning muscular exhaustion, and thus temporarily paralysing "voluntary muscles"—muscles, that is, which are under conscious control. It is induced as well (as in the case cited) by stroking, and thus putting to sleep the sensory nerves—nerves which define the patient's consciousness of his material personality. It would seem that by such inhibition, or paralysis, of the perceptions of the outer consciousness, faculties of Subconsciousness—even of Supra-consciousness—are exposed, so that Mind itself may be dealt with direct.

Every form of insensibility is closely allied with muscular relaxation or paralysis.

IV

Examples of the operation of the Supra-conscious faculties upon the concrete plane are supplied by the marvellous feats of "lightning calculators."

The most intricate mathematical problems—calculations that would call for lengthy and complicated intellectual processes on the part of expert mathematicians to work out by ordinary methods—are solved instantaneously by the genius of such natural "calculators." You cannot puzzle them; you cannot baffle them. Scarcely have you stated your problem than they have calmly presented you with the solution. As Maeterlinck records in his interesting book, The Unknown Guest, this genius for figures developed in Colbourn and Safford at the age of six, in Mangiamele at ten, in Gauss and Whateley at three. All that and more than expert mathematicians laboriously acquire by decades of study and practice, these boy-prodigies achieved by way of native faculty. Such have not the slightest notion how they arrive at their results. These are obtained automatically—are products of unconscious cerebration.

Maeterlinck observes of this, that the resultant "appears to rise, infallible and ready-done, from a sort of eternal and cosmic reservoir wherein the answer to every question lies dormant."

What is this "eternal and cosmic reservoir" if it be not Mind, or Supra-consciousness, as distinguished from conscious intellection—a native intuitive, but undifferentiate, or potential, consciousness which holds the answer, "infallible and ready-done," to every question.

Truth Is. There is but one solution—the true one—of a mathematical or any other problem of exact science.

A significant fact is that such prodigy boys generally lose their mysterious faculty "at the moment when the possessor begins to go to school." So soon, that is, as he develops the power of conscious brain-processes—the power to work out his problems by concrete methods—his native supra-conscious gift of solving them spontaneously fails.

Intuition, the woman-mode of arriving at conclusions, lightning quick and true without reason or reflection, is a kindred potency of Mind. "When a man," says a French writer, "has laboriously climbed a staircase, he is sure to find a woman at the top—although she will be unable to say how she came there!"

He did not add the further truth, that—as with the prodigy boys—the more you educate her to come at her conclusions by processes of intellection, the more you rob her of her native woman-gift of divination.

With the rising level of Faculty engendered by progressive evolution, woman's powers of intellection have developed too.

While her own mental attributes are themselves of a very high order, and give to her mentality an inductive subtlety and illumination lacking in that of the male. And this high quality of brain it is that is now being extinguished in her by straining her to masculine standards.

Progress awaits, indeed, the new and quickening impulse Life and Faculty should derive from the Woman-mind fostered along its own inherent lines—to supplement the mind of man. For as Bergson says, "it is to the very inwardness of Life that Intuition leads us."

And Intuition is the woman-mode of Mind.

* * * * *

The women intellectuals who have done great work have been women who inherited talents so far above the average, as spontaneously to have reached high mental levels, without need to have sacrificed those womanly traits which gave the noblest values to such work.

The woman of average brain, however, attains the intellectual standards of the man of average brain only at cost of her health, of her emotions, or of her morale.

V

Herbert Spencer said profoundly, "Mind is as deep as the viscera." Indicating it as being vital and intrinsic, at one with the occulted sources of Life.

Mind is of an order of mentality wholly different from that of Intelligence or Intellect. Mind is of the nature of Emotion. It is personal, is sympathy, is divination. It is the cerebration of the Soul.

The Soul, or essential Individuality, must abide amid infinitely delicate and delicately infinite brain-cells attuned to those spiritual vibrations whereof Mind is the reflex. And if Mind is Emotion, the Woman brain-half, which is the department of human emotion, must be the mainspring of the human mind.

Great intellect, pure and simple, may exist in man or woman without or with only a fractional leaven of Mind. This is seen in the abstractions of scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, astronomers, financiers, and others. Such brains are special organs of a high order of Intellection, clear, calculating and precise of observation and reflection; rational, deductive; admirable in their unswerving rectitude, pitiless in their impregnable emotionlessness; rejecting all but incontestable evidences, scrupulously aggregating and faithfully interpreting their dry bones of numbers and data and vestiges—skeletons of Life long since extinct, or scaffoldings of Life that lives and moves and laughs and weeps, and bears no more semblance to their bloodless tabulations of its modes and processes than warm, creative Mother-Earth resembles the geological strata they describe in her; or than a beautiful flower-garden blooms in botanical treatises; or than living men and women are pourtrayed in text-books of Anatomy and Physiology.

Many men of Science—and all the great ones—have been men of Mind as well as of Intellect. But the intellectual processes of Abstract Science are no more operations of Mind than the paths by which we climb to sun-illumined peaks are the Light upon those peaks. Mind is Spiritual Illumination—a glimmering of The Infinite, reflected in the highest and most subtle order of the brain-cells. Rays from it are deflected toward the concrete, to function as Intellection. But these rays enter the brain at a different angle from that of Mind-rays.

Like woman its medium, Mind is inspirational, wayward and elusive. It comes we know not whence. It goes we know not whither. Receptive, intuitive, creative, colourful, it may be unwitting of Astronomy, yet it roams amid the stars. Ignorant of Geology, in it Immortal, the dry-bones of The Past become immortal—arise eternally in everlasting re-creation. Its Biology is in the lives and loves, the hopes and fears, the throes and tears of human souls and stories. It inspires the poet, priest, historian, romancist, artist; the seer and statesman; the philosopher and wondering child. It exalts the humble and meek. It may be lacking in the cleverest and most learned of men. It is found in the most ignorant and simple women; in whom it is dumb, however, failing the intellectual talent of expression.

VI

The Woman brain-half being medium, in its higher region, of that Supra-conscious emotionalism which engenders Mind, and in its lower region, of that Subconscious emotionalism which engenders vital impulse in the body, woman's range of mentality is wider than is that of man; extending both higher and lower in its opposite reaches.

But because her Intelligent Consciousness is not inherent in her own brain-half, but is supplied by her borrowed masculine brain-half, her intelligence is more superficial, is weaker and less deep and strong of grip than is his. And when the gap between her upper and her lower registers is not duly bridged and stabilised by an efficient middle-register of male-intelligence, she tends toward two extremes of mentality, both of which are emotional. Thus she lives on the plane of her highest emotional impulses. Or she lives on the plane of her senses. Some women act and re-act perpetually between these two extremes.

In her highest Supra-reaches, she is athrill with Supra-faculties. In her lowest Sub-register, she is instinct and palpitant with the colour, the magnetic vibrations and the blind forces of Matter, which her vital processes are evolving into Life.

Extremes which are shown, at the one end, in the reasonless animal emotionalism of hysteria, with its abandon of control, its inco-ordinated muscular movements, its senseless weepings, cries and laughter; at the other end, in catalepsy, in which she exists detached from earth and its material needs and consciousness, subsisting, it may be for weeks together, without food or drink, withdrawn into the Inner, and potential, zones of Life and Mind. So that, no longer subject to limitations of Matter, she perceives without aid of the senses, apprehends without aid of intelligence, discerns without help of the eyes, hears without instrumentality of ears. And Time and Space no longer circumscribing her essential faculties, she visions happenings at the Antipodes, overhears whispers across a Continent, recalls The Past, foretells The Future.

It is because of the potence of the Subconscious medium in her, instinct with the magnetic forces of Evolving Matter, that, in her intelligence, she shows as more materialistic than man is, although warmer and more quickened in her feelings.

Living personalities and issues mean to her more than intellectual abstractions do. She is more materialistic because she cares more for the things that matter! The puddings which in her children's young bodies will be transmuted into living flesh and function, are to her of more significance than the Isosceles Triangle is.

(All that is true of the Woman brain-half must be true of the Woman brain-half in man. In him, however, his own hemisphere dominates the bent and faculty of its female counterpart.)

It is in the emotional impressionability of the Subconsciousness that habit, good and bad, is formed. Hence woman's native susceptibility to her environment—a susceptibility which renders indispensable due protection of her mind and nature during years when habits of thought and of conduct are shaping in her. Normal man, whose emotionalism is (like woman's intelligence) a borrowed faculty, differs essentially from her in this. His intelligence is inherent and more stably rooted. He is far less mimetic, far less a creature of circumstance. His firmer will and stronger intellect enable him to rise superior to environmental conditions, to shake himself free alike of habit and of circumstance; his pioneering spirit disposing him to new departures.

VII

Dual Personality, Catalepsy, Epilepsy, Shock, Insanity, Chorea are explicable as effects of abnormal dissociations or inherent discrepant relations between the two brain-hemispheres, which represent, respectively, Conscious (or objective) Intelligence, and Subconsciousness (which is subjective).

Such discrepancy occasioning confusion between the two planes of mentality, perception becomes so blurred that, as in insanity, subjective impressions are perceived as objective fact. And some idea or spectre of his own mind becoming thus objective, and being seen out of all perspective with the facts and conditions of everyday life, the patient may be so haunted and dominated thereby that not only his mentality, but his actions too may take distorted shape.

While the Conscious Brain-half is a lens that focuses the Concrete, the Subconscious Brain-half is a highly-sensitised mirror (or retina) that reflects and retains, in terms of potential Memory, all impressions and experiences. It becomes charged thus with a medley of strange and incongruous imprints, which, so long as the lens keeps these submerged and subconscious—because unfocused on the plane of consciousness—do not obtrude upon mentality. Flaws or failures in the lens of reason allowing certain imprints to emerge, these become fixed ideas and obsessions.

It is by way of the Subconsciousness, that the hypnotist impresses "suggestion."

Clairvoyants and other "mediums" employ crystal-gazing and other devices in order to fatigue, and thus to paralyse or inhibit the visual function on the outer plane of Sight. By such means, the Subconscious visual faculty comes into operation, and sets them en rapport with their client's subconscious mentality. This becoming objective to them, those endowed with the gift of "Second-Sight" (a faculty not to be denied) are able to visualise in it misty impressions of the subjects' character, thoughts and circumstances. Those rare clairvoyants who are able to establish rapport with their client's Supra-consciousness may catch glimmerings of future events, even. Because Supra-conscious Mind, being Supra-Natural, is not bounded by the limitations of The Natural, in respect of Time and Space. In it, that which Was still Is, and that which Is-to-be already Has Been.

"Spiritists" who see or hear phenomena they attribute to "spirits" are (when such are genuine) for the most part visualising or overhearing phenomena of their own (or of some other's) Subconsciousness, which, owing to errors of refraction in the lens of Consciousness, have become objective to them.

It may well be by way of magnetic vibrations communicated to Ether by the Supra or the Subconsciousness, that apparitions and telepathic impressions are transmitted from the brain of one person to that of another. So too, apparitions seen of persons lately dead, and so-called spiritist "communications" with these, may be (when genuine) phenomena of such etheric vibrations communicated to the Supra or the Subconsciousness of a living person, and apprehended by him in the objective forms of "ghosts" or "voices."

Kindred vital and powerful electric vibrations emanating, at the moment of death, from the Subconsciousness of victims murdered, may so charge the etheric element of houses and localities as to be communicable, for long periods afterwards, to the Subconscious mentality of "sensitives," which serves thus as "wireless receiver." Such sensitives derive the impression that the scene of the tragedy is haunted by the actual "spirit" of the murdered.

It is as incredible, of course, that an immortal soul should be chained to the scene of the violent death of a mortal body as it is incredible that a "spirit" should be at the call of a "medium," who—perhaps, for a fee—should be able, at will, to summon it back to the plane of concrete conditions, in order that it might talk (for the most part) irrelevant nonsense.

On the other hand it is to be believed that, for a brief period after death, a spiritual entity may remain sufficiently in touch with the material plane as to be able, by way of those Etheric undulations continuous through all the planes of Being, to manifest its existence to one in close sympathy with it.

VIII

In an article by me, "Is Man an Electrical Organism?" which appeared in The Nineteenth Century, July, 1914, I showed—on the evidence of careful and delicate experiments by an electrical expert—that the two sides of the body (and presumably of the brain) are of different electrical potential. The active, right side is positively electrified, while the passive, left side is negatively electrified.

Mental Telepathy and Telæsthesia prove, surely, that brain and nerve-currents are electrical—one brain-hemisphere operating as transmitter, the other as receiver. Since Nature employs one Law only to suspend the mighty solar systems of the Universe and to bring an apple to the ground, is it credible that she should employ two laws for "Wireless" and for Human telegraphy, respectively?

The Hibernation both of animal and vegetative organisms shows two poles of vital function; Life and Consciousness passing into the Recessive, or potential, mode during such winter-sleep. Plants sleep by night.

Is Sleep a recession merely from the state of Consciousness to the potential states of Sub- and Supra-consciousness? And do these two states alternate normally in the opposite halves of the brain, concurrently with the alternation of Day and Night? Night-blindness suggests such an alternation in the dual factors of Vision—which comprises the intrinsic faculty of Vision and the concrete function of visualising the external. Every concrete function normally wanes with the waning of Day.

Hence increasing drowsiness, passing into Sleep.

Morning and evening mentality differ greatly. Intellect, reason and physical activity are paramount during the day. Emotion and imagination intensify with the approach of night.

Is this an alternation in function of the Male and Female brain-hemispheres, coincident with the alternation of the dual luminaries of our earth—the positive, unchanging Dominant Sun; the changeful Moon, with her Recessive phases and her mystical influences upon Life and Mind? The ante-natal life of the embryo is set in terms of lunar months. The word "lunatic" expresses the effects of lunar phases on persons of unstable mentality.

Whence do we derive our daily influx of Life? Though we have sunk to rest with dissolution in our bones, we awake re-charged with powers of living—a phenomenon for which Science has no explanation.

Life does not originate in vital processes; vital processes originate in Life. Do we, in sleep, when processes have exhausted our daily influx of Life-power, recruit this again from a psychical source? Are living processes the wick of a lamp which is filled with the Spirit of Life at each recurring dawn, spent by the day's endeavour, and re-filled again with the following dawn?

Failure of sleep kills more swiftly than starvation. And drug-insensibility will not preserve life unless natural sleep supervene.

If nervous energy is a complex form of electrical energy, then the brain in which this is stored is an electrical dynamo. Is this dynamo re-charged during sleep from some Occult Power-station?

Since, in every equation of Science, an unknown factor reveals itself, why not candidly confess this to be a Spiritual factor?

Spirit is no more a hypothetical medium than Ether is. And Science has been forced to assume the existence of Ether, as a basis for its calculations. Ether and Spirit are conceivably the same medium manifesting on different planes—the one of Physics, the other of Mind.

IX

According to Professor Clarapède:

"The intellect appears only as a makeshift, an instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of impotence."

A saying which supports three clauses of my hypothesis: First, that the brain, with its tributary spinal-nervous system, is an instrument of Consciousness wholly differentiated from, and supplementary to the organism of Life. Secondly, that it is an instrument designed for the adaptation of the organism to environment (the rôle I have assigned, throughout, to the male). Thirdly, that the organism of Life is not itself adapted to its environment, and that, accordingly, Adaptation to Environment cannot be regarded as the impulse of Evolutionary development, since the living organism has so far failed to adapt itself to environment that it requires a highly specialised instrument to serve as medium between itself and its surroundings.

That Intellect—being an instrument by way of which Life is adapted to environment, as also, on the other hand, by way of which environment is adapted to Life—is a makeshift that "reveals a state of impotence" is not to be admitted, however, in view of the fact that it is an instrument which preserves Life from developing along the lines of its environment; an adaptation which would necessarily involve lapse from typal ideals.

Intelligence taught man, in place of so adapting to environment as to have developed the fist of a gorilla (which at a blow can crack a human skull), to arm himself with a club. And by thus adapting environment to his evolutionary requirements, he conserved his resources and applied them to development along higher lines. Such impotence as may be, arises out of the undevelopment of a rudimentary organism. Of an organism in course of development, however. In the meanwhile, both man and woman are provided, in their hybrid constitution, with the "makeshift" of an instrument of opposite sex, which supplies both with the powers neither has yet developed in himself or herself; but without which neither is able to exist or to function.

Hybrid Humanity is still amphibious; a creature living between two planes, the Without and the Within, the Material and the Spiritual. And like all amphibious creatures, the human species is, in a measure, clumsy and imperfect. Because while fitted still with organs and faculties that have adapted to a lower plane, it possesses likewise organs and faculties that are adapting to a higher. Its powers thus handicapped by requiring to engender the vital potential and the developmental power to equip it with two orders of implement, neither order has attained perfection of construction or of function. And both ministering to the requirements of the other, necessarily hamper the operations and mask the characteristics of the other.

The two sexes are making all the while for higher development, each along routes of its contrary trend. Man develops human faculty in the direction of the Outer and material plane of Being. Woman develops it in the direction of the Inner and psychical plane.

Man transmits to woman a brain-hemisphere and powers ever further increased and intensified in their relation to the concrete. Woman transmits to man a brain-hemisphere ever further indrawn and illumined in respect of the emotional and intrinsic. Woman's brain-hemisphere, adapting to its concrete fellow, becomes increasingly empowered to manifest, upon the outer plane, its own essential Woman-traits in Life and Consciousness. Man's brain-hemisphere, adapting to its diviner fellow, becomes increasingly illumined and inspired thereby to leaven and exalt its concrete outlook and activities.

Man's brain, by way of its responsive adaptation to the brain of woman interior to it in the zone of Mind, becomes thus ever more sympathetically intelligent, or intuitive, in respect of human life and conditions, of Science and the Arts; while losing nothing of its Dominance and concrete power, but interpreting its operations in terms of a profounder and a nobler Chivalry. Woman's brain becomes ever more intelligently sympathetic and practically helpful; losing nothing of its Recessiveness, or emotional impulse, but, on the contrary, intensifying all its Woman-attributes by extending the range and the operations of these in terms of a profounder and a nobler Altruism.

* * * * *

Because of their hybrid constitution, there is necessarily a borderland, alike of faculty and function, wherein the organisation and the characteristics of the sexes merge and approximate one another's trend and traits. This borderland represents, however, the crudest and least differentiated department of the personal and mental powers of both. It is a zone of Neuterdom, and marks a grade of rudimentary organisation in which the Sex-characteristics have not yet sufficiently diverged in development, as clearly and finely to differentiate themselves as traits of pure and unalloyed type.

The cruder the species or the evolutionary stage of species, the less Sex is specialised in it.

CHAPTER V

MALE AND FEMALE SEX-INSTINCTS AND MORALE DIAMETRICALLY DIFFERENT

"In conjunction with any other beings but men, women would have been angels; but with men they are just women, which when all is said and done, is much the same thing."—De Livry.

I

Among many other misconceptions with regard to Sex-characteristics, is the modern teaching that the sex-instinct is identical in men and women.

Ignoring the truth that a higher moral code is the mark of psychical superiority, and moreover that the exaction of it from women, under social penalty, has done more than any other thing to purify and to exalt the woman-character, impassioned fallacy now sees this higher standard demanded of the sex as a stigma of inferiority, and as an injustice. Accordingly it preaches equal liberty in this as in other respects. The trend toward equalisation is unfortunately (but inevitably) in the direction of lowering the woman-code rather than of raising man's.

No falser or more disastrous doctrine could be promulgated. As in all its other attributes and functions, so in this, the woman-nature differs wholly from that of the male. The primal male sex-instinct was one of tyranny and subjugation. There was no element of affection in it, and its bent was toward promiscuity. In the primal female, the instinct as an initiative impulse was non-existent. The surrender was to fear, and to habit engendered by fear. Fondness for her mate came to woman by way of her love for his child, a source essentially monogamous in trend.

Physical passion in woman is derived from the Male-traits in her. It is, accordingly, a borrowed, not an inherent instinct. And in all natural women, passion is secondary to love; love belonging to her own intrinsic nature. Because of its heritage, there is, in a true woman's love, always a maternal altruistic element: unselfish, ministering, devoted. Love has come to be intensified in her by fire of passion and by force of personal attraction. It is no longer a mere meek surrender, with fear for spur and maternity for solace. In proportion as she is of high organisation, it has become a complex of mind and emotion and sense; intense and vital. But always, in proportion as she is womanly, her own way of loving—the way of devotion and tenderness—is ascendant over passion.

In man, howsoever it be leavened by the higher love, passion dominates. When in woman passion dominates love, she is loving with the Male-traits in her—not as woman. And in the measure wherein she falls short of the womanly monogamous ideal, she is less woman than she is male.

Mr. Justice Hannen, for long President of the Divorce Court—and a subtle expert in women—observed that it was not the passionate, warm-eyed women who figured most before him, but, in far greater number, the cold-blooded, greedy and emotionless. Because for one woman who succumbs to love or passion, twenty transgress from motives of vanity or gain; or from mere frivolous craving for excitement.

It is the sexless women who are most immoral, for the same reason that some dyspeptics are always hungry. Persons of healthy digestion eat, and are satisfied. The healthfully-sexed love, and are content. The emotionless woman is for ever seeking in novelty, emotions she lacks the emotion to feel. Such women exploit passion for vanity, for distraction, or for the primal male-instinct of subjugation. Their desire for a lover is less a sentiment than it is of the nature of that craving for drink, or for drugs, or for dress, which many of this order also indulge. All are megalomanias—natural instincts distorted to vices by warp of abnormal self-centredness.

With its foundations laid in instinct, its organic emotionalism, its streak of mental irresponsibility, and its hunger for approbation, the Woman-nature, when lacking in the higher Woman-traits of affection and selflessness, or when these are not duly absorbed in the natural interests and functions of the sex, may degenerate to a very ugly thing.

Some of our latter-day "smart" young married women, childless or with one or two children consigned to hirelings, their passions excited by marriage and not duly assuaged by maternity, their impulses unchastened and their powers unexpended in affection and care for the family, seek outlet and distraction in promiscuous philanderings, in intrigue or in vice.

Human faculty and impulse diverted from their normal channels readily find crooked and dangerous courses.

In the fourth year of War, the Prussian Protestant State-Church declared that "immorality among German women has attained such a degree that the very foundations of Society are threatened." This and kindred developments in other War-ridden countries are not due to women having changed their natures, but are the outcome of conditions so altered as to have released them from the wholesome disciplinary exercise of their accustomed duties, relaxing thus the salutary curbs of habit and convention. Child of Nature that she is, woman is a born rebel; for ever in revolt against the law and order and restraints which man has imposed as indispensable to Progress. Whereas men abhor, women exult in crises and upheavals. Because these serve for outlet to their restive emotionalism and supply scope for exotic sensation, while at the same time giving them temporary mastery over the male—who is always at a disadvantage in exhibitions of feeling.

And this temperamental erraticism is valuably disciplined by the masculine bent for rule and method, and normally finds admirable safety-valves in wifely, housewifely, and motherly functions.

II

To advocate a moral standard higher for women than for men is regarded now as reactionary and regressive.

Nevertheless, it is certain that beyond all the other virtues, personal purity is essentially the highest, and is racially the most valuable of all the Woman-qualities. Lapses in the other sex are in no way comparable, as regards moral, biological, or sociological significance, with kindred lapses in woman. Because of her native non-conformability, once she has deviated from the monogamous code, she is dangerously likely never after to conform to it. (It is a truism that The woman who has one, has many lovers.) Her non-conformity requires, accordingly, to be protected by a social ordinance more rigid than is that of man. Man being less complex of psychology, moreover, that which in him is merely biological is vice in woman. The fact alone that the male is able to employ the sex-function as a weapon of brutality (as in violation) proves him totally dissimilar to woman in this relation.

Man disperses; Woman absorbs. And the consistency of Nature is such that these two diametrically-opposite biological modes in reproduction are reflected on the planes of mind and impulse. The diametrical difference of the modes disposes outright of the Feminist demand for identical moral codes for the sexes; the sex-functions of the two being so intrinsically contrary in method and inherence, with correspondingly signal differences in moral impulse and significance.

Biologically, the masculine function concludes with its fulfilment. Whereas the feminine function begins mainly therewith, and continues thence onward to operate in an ever-deepening, broadening, and intensifying tide of issues; biological and psychological. And so potent and subtle is Nature's consistency with regard to this primary and vital function of woman in Life, that whether or not biological issue results, psychological issues do inevitably. Woman's mode and mood of receptiveness in this mysterious union so operate that, in her surrender, she admits to the inmost sanctuary of her being an alien presence—which remains with her till death. Fade as it may from her consciousness, it remains, nevertheless, impressed for ever after on the vibrant records of her sensitive Subconsciousness, as vitally as in the hour of her surrender. And underlying mind and character and conduct ever after, it for ever after contributes its quota to these.

Because of the vivifying potence of her creative womanhood—the function whereof is to engender Life—the stranger admitted to her citadel becomes endued with Life, and takes up his abode with her to the end of her natural term. For this reason, the adulterous woman is adulterous in a sense impossible to man—adulterous in both a vital and an intrinsic psychical sense that is revolting.

With the increasing intensification in the male, with advancing evolution, of his inherited Woman-traits, he has become ever further endowed with Woman's Sub- and Supra-conscious faculties. So that the function which was, in its primal moral, but brief and cursory, ending summarily with its biological fulfilment, has become increasingly endued in him with the vital emotionalism, and accordingly with the moral significance inherent to the Woman-nature. If his experiences fade more quickly from his consciousness than hers do, they remain nevertheless (in the degree of his psychical development) potent still in his Subconsciousness—as possibly adulterating and debasing factors. But since his Subconscious emotionalism is an acquired and not an inherent part of his male mentality, it is a medium vastly less sensitised and operative in him than it is in her; of whom it is the very basis of her being.

This is no apology, of course, for masculine aberration, but a counsel of feminine virtue—a counsel making indirectly, therefore, but none the less surely for masculine virtue also. The reasons for chastity in the one sex differ diametrically from those which should be the motive thereof in the other, however.

Chivalry and Prostitution are incompatible.

It must be confessed, however, that deterioration of the woman-organisation and temperament conduces greatly to masculine promiscuity. Not only because this entails loss of power to charm and bind the mate, but because with the sex-immaturity, on the one hand of the over-Feminised type, on the other, of the Mannish woman, women lose, in greater or less degree, the natural power of one sex to assuage passion in the other.

Man is deteriorated, moreover, by moral and psychical deterioration in that sex whence moral impulse springs, because, in such case, the appeal of woman ceases to be, as is normal, to the emotional and chivalrous in him, but evokes, on the contrary, biological instinct mainly, or merely.

It is well-established truth that her first lover (or her husband, supposing she had loved him) retains a unique hold upon a woman's mind throughout her after-life—his personality or memory dominating her imagination as no later-comer is able to do. This is because that first enters into possession of both Consciousness and Subconsciousness while the tablets of these are still virgin and unblotted. This first impresses himself, therefore, clearly and strongly defined upon her exquisitely-sensitised tablets of remembrance.

Latter-day young girls, permitted the injurious licence of free and unchaperoned association with the other sex, even when they come to marriage, inviolate, have, many of them, passed through experiences which so have blurred and sullied their young highly-impressionable temperament and senses as to have despoiled these of that fair purity and freshness indispensable alike to potent impressions and to deep attachments. In natural woman who has arrived at womanhood without premature arousing of the senses, soul and sense are at fine poise, and respond in vital unison to love. In girls whose innocence and conduct have not been duly safeguarded, the prematurely-excited senses have become detached from the soul—from the higher emotions, that is. With the result that this fine poise of mind and body, which is the Hall-mark of Woman-development, and whence romantic passion issues, has been irretrievably lost.

The same is true, in degree, of young men. They too deteriorate when biological instinct is dissociated in them from the higher impulses of passion. But in men, the poise, being less delicate, is not only less readily lost, but it is more readily recovered. In this, as in other things, the normal male makes for means; while woman's bent is toward extremes. Further, physical passion being normally far stronger in him, and initiative in impulse—whereas in her it is mainly responsive—the senses assert sway over him spontaneously. While in natural girls these lie more or less dormant, unless artificially roused, or until aroused in natural response to love.

Early philanderings (more serious than boy-and-girl comradeship and innocent flirtation) prevent women not only from ever attaining their highest levels of organisation and temperament, but they destroy effectually their power to love profoundly and whole-heartedly. They rob them, accordingly, of the greatest transfiguring potence and happiness of life.

III

Odious and startling evidence that because of woman's vital emotionalism and sensitive psychology, her nature retains ineffaceable vestiges of all that has happened to her, is the fact that a woman's children by a second husband may resemble her first husband far more than they resemble their father. A significant and repulsive adulteration of type, and one so intrinsic that a woman who had been previously wife to a negro or a Chinaman will present her second husband, typically European, with offspring of negroid or of Mongolian type. That husbands and wives come to resemble one another in physiognomy and characteristics, is further indication of the subtle and potent temperamental fusion and implications of the mysterious sex-union.

The adulteration of type which may thus repulsively mar the offspring of women twice-mated is seen, at first hand, in that adulteration of personality which results from sex-promiscuity. Not only is the individuality both of mind and character obliterated, but the individuality both of form and feature is obliterated too. The features of persons of irregular life become blurred and more or less mongrel; character and expression so degenerating as to produce eventually that which has been styled a "composite face"—the face resulting when a number of portraits of different persons are printed one over another on the same photographic plate.

The degree to which in the sex-union—howsoever lightly entered on—they twain become intrinsically and remain irrevocably one, in the vital records of individualism and character, is wholly unsuspected. But in this—which is a complex phenomenon of Hypnosis—indelible undying images, such as are impressed upon the Subconscious mind in every other form of Hypnosis, remain impressed thereon; to inspire and fructify, or to weaken and vitiate nature and faculty.

That vigilant supervision of her young daughters for which the early Victorian mother is now decried, secured a purity of racial type, in fine physique and constitution, in notable talent and enterprise, in rare womanly beauty and virile handsomeness, which proves the unique potentialities inherent in our Anglo-Saxon stock. No merely material service a woman can render to the State approaches in value the all-potent one of safeguarding the virtue of its young daughters.

Each sex has its own morale to sustain. And personal virtue is woman's. The desire for equal liberty in this respect is added proof of the ascendancy, in modern women, of Male over their own natural Woman-traits. It springs not from an intensification of passion, but, on the contrary, from a waning of that power to love which holds a woman true to one mate.

Last and most cogent of reasons: In view of those long centuries of suffering and aspiration, by way of which the evolution of the Woman-traits of love and purity has been achieved in blood and tears—albeit the monogamous ideal is far yet from attainment—beyond all else, the sex should strive toward this, both personally and socially.

It is the soul of Love and Life, the impulse of Human advance. With decline of this ideal, the emotions cease to centre in the Home and Family, and civilisation relapses to barbarism.

IV

Ellen Key, in Love and Marriage, observes: "Few propositions are so lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of sexual life which is indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations." And further: "all the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place while monogamy was indeed the law, but polygamy the custom."

She overlooks the portentous truth that a law is the expression of a general aspiration toward an ideal for which a people is striving. That a law is broken proves that the higher in man moves him to set a standard beyond his power—or beside his inclination—to sustain undeviatingly. Yet although he may not act up to it undeviatingly, it stands, nevertheless, for the ideal he realises that he should reach.

Abolition of a good and elevating law proves, therefore, not only the serious lapse of a community from an established standard of conduct, but it inevitably lowers the level of conduct by removing barriers—self-respect and self-restraint, public opinion and so forth—standing in the way of laxity. Despite the death-penalty, murders are committed. But were the death-penalty to be abolished, murder would increase by leaps and bounds. The human mind is strangely susceptible. And the power of habits acquired under fear of penalties is an invaluable force for good. The higher minds of a community evolve and establish codes for lesser minds to shape by. And undoubtedly the subconscious as well as the conscious shaping toward such standards furthers development in the directions thereof. To make honesty a matter of personal choice, with no penalties attaching to theft, would be in itself an incentive to theft.

Comparison with polygamous countries, of countries in which monogamy is the law, refutes straightway Miss Key's discredit of monogamy; showing the polygamous uncivilised, unenlightened, unprogressive, subject to monogamous races, and in every sense, both materially and morally decadent. And if, with a notion of establishing equality in all things between the sexes by emancipating woman from the higher moral code, leasehold marriage or other forms of wedded laxity should be substituted—not only would national purity, but personal character and happiness too would suffer grievously.

If men have not kept the monogamous law, the instinct of jealousy, reinforced by repugnance to supporting alien offspring, has seen to it that wives should trespass as seldom, at all events, as was possible to be guarded against. Custom and public opinion, furthered by personal fear and fear of divorce, have all contributed toward advancing ideals of womanly honour and conduct. And from monogamous mothers—whether voluntarily or involuntarily so—progress has derived immense impulse. Apart from biological considerations, the benefit to the family of the mother's influence centred in her home and kept from straying thence, either by her own aspirations, by public opinion, or by fear of the husband, has been incalculable.

During and since the War, crime among children has increased by 50 per cent., largely owing to absence of mothers from their homes, working or drinking, or otherwise dissipating, while their children have been left to run wild in the streets.

Our reformatories are full to overflowing with these neglected unfortunates; deprived thus of the haven of homes and maternal control. As a man is responsible to the State for the support of his family, so a woman should be held responsible to the State for the proper care and supervision of its future citizens, who, without due care and disciplinary influence, become a burden and scourge to the community.

In all these vitally-momentous issues, let us free our minds alike of sex-bias and false sentiment, in order that we may see clearly, and may act honestly and wisely in the interests not only of women themselves, but in those of the Race.

V

The sex-instinct in woman having had its origin in surrender, retains much still of this primal element. And both middle-class men of lower evolutionary grade, and men of the working classes, exercise still, to considerable degree, the brute-trait of terrorism over women—moral rather than physical terrorism.

In rescuing young girls from molestation in the streets, one may see in them the panic of such intimidation. They are pale and trembling, with pupils widely dilated. In full daylight, it may be in a crowded thoroughfare, with police at hand, primal instinctive emotionalism paralyses reason, resource and will-power. Weak-minded women, who lack their due share of masculine combativeness to stiffen resistance in them, frequently marry, or otherwise yield to such men, far more because they are afraid than because they are fond of them. And the terrorism husbands have exercised over wives has nerved wives against the terrorism exercised over them by other men; and has thus served to protect them from their own weaknesses.

The Woman-traits, always at a disadvantage in concrete affairs against superior strength, have been buttressed thus and coerced—often cruelly and tyrannously, 'tis true. But they have nevertheless been greatly furthered in development by a mate who, if he did not recognise the higher calibre of woman's nature, nor himself aspired to the code he exacted from her, recognised, at all events, that this higher code he exacted of her was that best adapted to progress. Thus has poor mortality been beaten and shapen on the anvils of compulsion and exigency. And always the woman has most suffered—to be beautiful of nature.

Were it not that an advance-guard of higher and chivalrous men stand, by force of the laws they have made, between women and the lower and coarser masculine orders, no woman's life would be worth the living because of perpetual affront. With existing laws, indeed, which protect even the most degraded of the sex, the women of the poorer classes are everywhere subject to insult and unseemly jest, open or covert. Because to many men of crude order, the eternal mystery of Sex shows mainly as subject for levity. The crass and unimaginative frequently deride thus things too high for their dense understanding.

Women have come to take their chivalrous protection by law as mere matter-of-course, precisely as they take it as matter-of-course that men should labour, and should endow them with the benefits of their industry. These things are by no means matter-of-course, however, but are matter of chivalry—chivalry so innate as to have become convention.

It would be occasion for laughter, were it not cause for profoundest regret, that the hypertrophy of male-traits in woman has engendered to-day a sex-antagonism which has set her in open revolt against man, from whom, if she has suffered and suffers, and will continue to suffer at the hands of his defects, she nevertheless derives, and has always derived from his chivalries her most gracious human privileges.

That the obligations and the recompenses of the sexes are reciprocal, is true. It is equally true, however, that the choice has lain with men to have ignored the nobler issues of the compact. As the seraglio-imprisoned women of the less manly and progressive peoples prove.

All our civilisation, with its complex sociological, intellectual, and moral developments, rests on a basis of Force. Men must still prove their right to each and all of their laboriously-won achievements by arms and the valours of war. In peace, the laws—which alone make life tolerable—rest equally upon the powers of masculine will and strength to inflict due punishment for violation thereof.

And laws having been made by men, it was clearly optional with them to have left women unprotected, or far less protected than the other sex; in place of having extended special protection to their more delicate attributes.

In safeguarding women in general, men safeguard their own individual women, of course. Human motive is involved; is the product of a number of factors. That this is so is reason for eliminating no single one of these factors, lest the resultant undergo a wholly unexpected and disastrous transformation.

The Plan sets most women at the mercy of most men, by reason of the greater physical strength of males, and by temptation of their more urgent sex-instinct. In view of her inherent disabilities, it would have seemed, a priori, that no woman could in ruder days have attained to womanhood, inviolate.

And yet that her very disabilities have served for her increasing protection is shown by the fact of her increasing protection as, with the evolution of her higher organisation, her disabilities have intensified.

Civilised woman, with her more delicate organisation, is far more defenceless than was savage woman. But in response to the claims of her increasing defencelessness, the instinctive chivalry of the stronger male, her natural protector, has become progressively the intelligent and moral chivalry of higher man. No strength or capability of woman's own to defend herself could so have served her; nor could so have served the other sex for fine incentive.

To free woman of her highly specialised and inspiring disabilities by substituting in her, powers, muscular and mental, that would fit her to meet the male on equal terms, would be to frustrate the method of the male evolutionary ascent, by eliminating the humanising and uplifting appeal to his manhood of these her inspiring unfitnesses.

The deplorable decadence in masculine regard for and bearing toward women, which has resulted in direct proportion as the sex has substituted male efficiencies for womanly ineptitudes, serves for one of many other valuable object-lessons of the War.

VI

Among other Feminist fallacies, the demi-mondaine has come to be regarded as victim merely, on the one hand, of an unjust, man-administered economic system, on the other, of masculine libertinism. The truth is that the vast majority of immoral women are under no compulsion, but voluntarily adopt this mode of life either to escape work, or because of a natural vicious proclivity. A number are mental defectives; some actually feeble-minded, others only morally deficient.

It must always be remembered, moreover, that, biologically speaking, the separation of the genus woman into the folds, respectively, of sheep and goats is of signal racial and social service. That some goats are in the sheep-fold, some lambs among the goats, is not to be denied. Fatalities, injustices, and incongruities are inevitable to all broad human classifications. In the main, however, the women who resist temptation and remain virtuous are obviously better fitted to be the wives and mothers of the Race than are they who fall.

And although this is not, of course, the calculated purpose of this lamentable under-world, the rough division of the sex thereby into two main classes has been of service, by supplying a sociological backwater wherein the worst of our racial derelicts—mental and moral defectives—are segregated; and are precluded, for the most part, from perpetuating their mental and moral defectiveness.

Women, like men, must uphold and battle for their standards in the teeth of circumstance. The most notable types of parasite-women, selfish, slothful, worthless, venal, vicious, whose standards are jewels and clothes, their goals luxury and pleasure and the evasion of all that is difficult and distasteful in life, are found among the aristocratic and the plutocratic orders; safely secured against economic necessity or lack of scope and outlet for their powers.

The Feminist fallacy that prostitution is almost entirely a product of male economics has been strikingly refuted, too, by War-conditions, which opened numerous well-remunerated employments for the sex. Yet, coincident with a sad deficit of women to fill these, prostitution has waxed rampant.

Wise and discreet were those early Victorians, with their uncompromising ostracism of loose women. Apart altogether from such salutary expression of their condemnation of impure living, they were vastly too clever and far-seeing to admit persons of notoriously evil habit, peeress or actress, to association with their clean young girls, as modern mothers do; to meet and to mix freely with them socially or at Charity Bazaars, on Flag-Days, and so forth. With the result that girls all the world over have become increasingly lax and decadent in tone and manner, in dress and morale, from confusion of their young standards by social tolerance and recognition of such persons, as also from corruption by demoralising contact with and observation of such.

Intolerance? Pharisaism? By no means!

The strong and straight, uncompromising moral standards of its women serve as landmarks of, and impulse to a nation's progress. Clear and definite lines of demarcation between good and evil, between possible and impossible modes of conduct, point the moral of advance, and turn the scale in the upward direction for the weak, the hesitating, and the imitative.

Dread of consequences went far, in less sophisticated days, to safeguard and foster womanly virtue. Modern expedients have, unfortunately, removed all cause for fear in this relation; permitting an impunity of action demoralising to the weak in will or principle, who require every possible aid and check to guide them aright. In simpler days, girls who had lapsed were steadied and strengthened in character and self-restraint by the compulsion to support, as too by their natural fondness for the unwanted child. Now the first step—having cost them nothing—predisposes to further backslidings. And both character and self-control degenerate increasingly.

VII

To weaken the marriage-bond by setting it for a term of years only, or by making it terminable by consent, would virtually destroy marriage and family-life. The fact that the bond would not be binding would make persons more careless even than they are at present in selection of the mate, and would thus multiply the number of mis-matings. Which would be still further to deteriorate species, since the finer types of children are born only of well-mated parents.

The finality of the bond, if it does not always prevent one or both from meeting some other they prefer, prevents the scrupulous, at all events, from seeking such. Or having found, it keeps many from fostering and from yielding to temptation. Were marriage terminable, or, as is sometimes proposed, were it abolished wholly, and love the only bond between the sexes, there would be no confidence, no sense of security between the partners, no stability of family life; no centring of interests in this, and but small endeavour to retain affections which for the many could be easily replaced—and replaced, moreover, with the zest of novelty. On the contrary, a curse of unrest would afflict the vast majority of married folk with the unsettling—mayhap with the alluring—prospect of meeting their further "Fate"; perhaps their second, possibly their third, it might be, their seventh "Fate."

Only the few are strong enough of heart or stable enough of character to remain steadfast for a lifetime in any undertaking, unless bound stringently thereto by authorised obligations, incentives, and penalties. Only the few are deep enough of nature to love for a lifetime; or are deep enough of nature to love so intensely as to justify altering the marriage-code in order to spare these few suffering. The wane of nine out of ten honeymoons impresses the value of an inflexible decree that declines to reckon with disillusion, but sternly bids the disillusioned take up their burden and make the best of it. And having no choice, many do this and make a success of it—on new, and, it may be, on far higher lines than those they had set out upon.

That but few love so deeply as to love for life by no means implies that marriage for less than a lifetime should be substituted. It shows, on the contrary, that the majority of persons would prove as incapable of loving No. Two for long as they had been incapable of loving No. One; or as they would be incapable of loving No. Three, or No. Ten. A bond that rivets them for life to No. One therefore, and entails loss or suffering when they fail to abide by it, is safeguard for them against such a succession of loves as would be as demoralising to the individual as it must be destructive of society.

Examples of this tendency to amorous licence have been furnished by the complications of War-"widows," who, on report of the death of soldier-husbands, remarried in unseemly haste—only to find the husband return. So too, by the widespread infidelity of wives to absent soldier-husbands. If the grave and moving circumstance of a husband facing death or mutilation in the trenches, for his country's defence, was not grave nor moving enough to keep his wife faithful to him, then we should congratulate ourselves upon a marriage-law which, by exacting penalties whereby such a wife suffers material damage, supplies the only argument likely to stiffen the morale of so light-minded and callous a creature.

Nothing less binding than a lifelong contract is coercive enough or is sufficiently chastening to bridle woman's native changefulness and curb her instinctive emotionalism. The realisation that there is no way out of a situation is her finest incentive to nobility. She bruises her impulses against the iron of circumstance, and the essences of her intrinsic Woman-soul distil in patience and in sweetness. Under the harrow of sacrifice, she feels herself martyred. And yet without the sense of martyrdom, as may be also without the conditions thereof, no true woman is ever wholly content that she is fulfilling her destiny.

Ellen Key writes of "all the impurity that the sexual life shuts up within the whited sepulchre of legal marriage." She falls here into the common error of assuming such evil to be restricted solely to the state of marriage. Whereas the higher interests, the duties and affections of the family life—purifying and inspiring influences lacking in unsanctioned unions—make inevitably for the uplifting of the relation. That some husbands and wives fall short of the pure intensity of passion possible to some others between whom love is the sole bond, is true, of course. But as are most other human developments, this is a matter of the character of individuals rather than of the terms of the bond uniting them. Certainly, high and tender passion is scarcely to be expected in a union for no better reason than that this is illicit.

VIII

Were life designed for happiness and pleasure merely, the case would be different. Were one life our sole portion, it might be different too. Having one life only, we might be justified in claiming for it the joy of the best love available. An unhappy or a less than happy marriage is only one, however, of the many expedients for the evolution of faculty.

If the evolution of the individual progresses by way of countless earth-existences strung upon a thread of spiritual continuity, one life is but a brief and single page of everybody's great Life-serial. That is, doubtless, why all feel their lot to be an episode merely—unexplained, and incomplete, rather than a finished story. And in our innumerable pages and innumerable episodes, we must resign ourselves to sundry matrimonial vicissitudes.

Says the author of The World-Soul, "The more function is specialised in either sex the less able either is to stand alone." This is argument for further and fuller specialisation of their respective functions, in both sexes, because so great is the happiness of fulfilling for that other his or her great need of us, and of being blessed by that other in our own need. But too, it raises the voluntary surrender of such happiness for honour's sake, for holiness' sake, for God's sake, or for children's sake, to the height of a renunciation which transfigures human life and character, and proportionally ennobles both.

That both man and woman should be entitled to divorce for infidelity, for incorrigible drunkenness, criminality or insanity on the part of the mate, would be just and reasonable clauses in the marriage-code. Because, apart from the unmerited cruelty and shame of such bondages, is the risk of entailing degenerate offspring. Otherwise, it appears that relaxation of the Divorce-Law would result in evils far worse than any it would remedy. And these evils would re-act inevitably far more cruelly—both temperamentally and materially—upon women and children than upon men.

The conjugal and the paternal instincts being traits the sex has acquired by long ages of developmental progress, for men to lose these would be as easy as the loss would be degenerative to themselves and to those others. Folly to suppose that having reached a certain stage of human character-building, we can, with impunity, kick away the foundations whereon our house of evolution has been raised; and on which it must rest for all time.

The irrevocability of the marriage-contract is woman's greatest security. Realisation of that sex-lawlessness which is an innate Male-trait—relic of the promiscuous and cursory nature of the primal male-instinct—should set us on guard against weakening, in the least degree, this covenant, which is the best among those privileges whereby man, in the teeth of his inherent instincts, has chivalrously protected woman and the family. In the teeth of these, he has applied his natural intelligent bent for Conformity in concrete affairs to the repression and regulation of his impulses by the institution of Marriage. And this—the apotheosis of masculine conformity to the exactions of Progress—is now menaced by the native Non-conformity of woman, exploited by Feminism.

It is notable that men are but seldom truly fond of, nor are they faithful to the wife who works outside the home. In France, where the clever, industrious wife of the middle and lower classes is more a business-partner than she is a wife, conjugal fidelity is not expected.

Not only is a house without a woman in it to devote her best interests and powers to the arts of home-making, not a home, but the bond of that fraction of interest and affection left over to her from her work outside it is a thing too slight to bind her husband to her. He finds no difficulty in substituting—should he seek this—a haven with more atmosphere of home and sentiment in it, companionship with more of temperament in it, more resiliency and freshness, than that of the industrious and wage-earning, but fatigued and jaded working-wife.

The children of such a union—if such there be—supply no bond either to draw together and unite their parents. Children reared by servants, without understanding or affection, are but seldom affectionate or charming. Moreover, the children of hard-working mothers are but seldom true children. They bring to the home nothing of the freshness, the vitality or charm of natural childhood.

If father and mother possess æsthetic sensibilities, these are offended probably by the plainness and the lack of graces in their offspring—bye-products merely of their economic assiduities. Perhaps the big spectacles through which the young eyes gaze forth like doleful prisoners from behind bars, make them feel strangely uncomfortable; as in the presence of weird and reproachful intelligences.

Neither derives interest or joy enough from the family circle to repay them for their parental obligations and responsibilities.

IX

Love between the sexes, being a need alike of souls and biogenesis, is regarded by some as reason enough in itself for relaxing the Marriage-law—even for the abolition of Marriage; making affection the sole bond between the lovers.

We cannot, logically, abolish the legal contract uniting two persons in marriage, however, without at the same time abolishing every other form of legal contract, and the legal liabilities thereof. Logically, we cannot make conjugal duty and family responsibility mere matters of personal conscience, unless we are assured that the human species has reached such a phase of moral integrity as to need no other incentive than its own integrity to secure fulfilment of its obligations, moral and material. If we abolish the legal factor in marriage, to be consistent we must abolish the legal factor in business partnerships and in all other sociological compacts. We must make the payment of rent, of rates and taxes, of tradesmen's bills and so forth, debts of conscience and of honour merely; for the discharge whereof conscience and honour must alone suffice.

It may be objected that these are purely material obligations, while the bond between the sexes is an emotional one. And yet—Have we reached such a stage of development that emotional considerations are more binding on us than material ones are?

Moreover, if we are to make love the sole bond—clearly the waning of love must release from the bondage. Further, when we sift out the purely emotional element in the vast majority of unions, we shall find it but a very slender factor among other more binding reciprocities. Certainly a far more slender thread to trust to in the safeguarding of a contract than is, for example, the factor of commercial honesty. Commercial honesty is not, perhaps, a conspicuous virtue of the times. Nevertheless, the sense of honesty in business is a good deal stronger in most men than is their sense of honour with regard to love. And their sense of honour in love has developed mainly as a direct consequence of those legal compulsions and responsibilities of love which have been exacted and fostered by the legality of marriage.

How many men are there, for example, who, having come to care for some other, hold themselves bound in the least by an illicit tie; howsoever much they may have cared at one time for the woman in the case? Lightly come—lightly go! And if the terms, marriage and love, are by no means necessarily synonymous, it has been, nevertheless, greatly by way of the obstacles and compulsions and the social penalties attaching to violation of the marriage vows that the love-passion has been purified and uplifted out of the barbarism of mere instinct and promiscuity, into the graces of emotion and the virtues of monogamy.

Had any man and woman, reciprocally attracted at their first meeting, been free always to have carried this attraction straightway to its biological conclusion, the sex-relation would be still the merely physiological incident it was in primal forests. The circumstance that such attraction has been debarred from ready consummation by the obligations and the obstacles engendered by a recognised and legalised bond between the sexes, has been debarred, moreover, in innumerable cases, by one of the attracted couple being subject to this bond—all of this has preserved the nascent emotion from straightway relapsing to the basic level whence it sprang, and has fostered the evolution of love in the higher reaches of emotion; of imagination, of controlled and chastened passion.

It may be said that modern men and women, loving one another with the more highly-evolved passion of our enlightened epoch, would love as devotedly and would remain as constant in an illicit as in a legalised union. If so, such constancy would be an echo mainly of the long-dignified state of wedded constancy; and the greatest of all tributes to the values of this. Nevertheless—For how long after the clarion-note of aspiration sounded by Marriage should have ceased to vibrate, would the echo of it last?

Should woman, in her short-sighted efforts to "emancipate" herself still further, release herself wholly (as she now inclines to do) from the marriage-bond, she will have thrown back in man's face the very tenderest guerdon of his worth and of his high regard for her. And she will have destroyed, at a blow, his most vital incentive to further advance, her own and her children's most powerful safeguard, and the main buttress not alone of national but, as well, of Natural human progress.

CHAPTER VI

FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN FACULTY

"A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home."—Chinese Proverb.

I

The paths alike of progress and of happiness lie, obviously, in the ever further dignifying and enhancement of the functions of home and of wifehood, by way of every further interest and charm that higher, fairer Womanhood confers.

The chief cause of latter-day conjugal unrest and disaffection is to be found—not in the natural state of marriage, but in a decline of those personal traits which make for happiness therein. Girls brought up as now, without home-interests or training, but, on the contrary, with mainly self-realising and self-absorbing aims and pursuits, are deficient not only in domestic aptitudes but lamentably also in emotional qualities. And the home-life without the emotions to give values to it, is like a fine air played on the keyboard of a piano from which have been removed the strings that transform the movements of the fingers into melody.

So keenly self-centred the majority of women have become, so bent upon their hobbies and careers, as to have lost nearly all of that sympathetic adaptiveness natural to woman, which enables her to forget—and to forget with pleasure—her own in the personality and interests of others.

How eagerly latter-day girls seek refuge from their boredom in the tennis-court, the Bridge-table, the dance, or in some other mode of direct action which entails but little temperamental tax or output!

To such degree the sexes are now drilled to the same standards, interests, and points-of-view, that neither brings to the other any new thing, of freshness, of colour, or of inspiration. The interchange is only too often a competitive struggle, indeed, as to which shall know (or shall appear to know) more than the other knows (or appears to know) of topics equally trite to both. There is little or nothing of the zest and glamour of a delightful picnic of two; whereat each keeps producing some new and unexpected thing to supplement the new and unexpected of the other. Modern woman has no novelty in language even for her mate, but deals him back his own slang—a vernacular which among women of the working-classes not seldom takes the forms of blasphemy and obscenity, wholly disqualifying for the rearing of children. As, indeed, do the coarse and vulgar phrases in vogue now among the cultured of the sex. In view of woman's native faculty of music and her subtle aptitude for naming (as for nick-naming), one cannot doubt that she it was who mothered Language. Yet now-a-days, adopting virile lingo, her "rotten," "stick-it," and the like are murdering the infant of her quondam genius. And what genius it was, that gave birth to our surpassing mother-tongue!

In case of engagement between a young man and his bored one—whom, by the way, although he may suspect that the relation is not all that it might be, he never suspects of being bored—manlike, he trusts to marriage "to put everything right." Yet although the newly-wedded more and more relieve themselves of the strain of a honeymoon, with its unmitigated (or inimitable) company of two, a month or six weeks of wedlock find most young modern couples wofully at cross-purposes. Possession has freed the man of the obligation to woo. And when the wooing—which had engendered for the woman a flattering and intoxicating sense of being a coveted prize—comes to a more or less abrupt ending, she feels herself defrauded.

He too! Because while Courtship is man's affair, Marriage is woman's. And where love is not, to recruit and quicken passion and to take the place of novelty, the wane of honeymoons is sad indeed.

(There are faults and failings on the bridegroom's part, 'tis true. That belongs to another story, however. Sufficient for these pages is the unpleasing task of holding a mirror to the faults of a single sex.)

It should be remembered that men, for the most part, are not eager to marry. Considering the nature of the bond, with its lifelong obligations, responsibilities and sacrifices, this is little to be wondered at. A week after marriage a wife may be crippled by an accident, may become insane; or may otherwise be thrown, more or less a burden, on her husband's hands. Or she may develop disagreeable and wholly uncongenial traits. In spite of which, even though they wreck his happiness, he will have bound himself to her—and will have bound himself to maintain her—till death them parts.

He too, of course, may turn out wholly unsatisfactory. That belongs likewise to the other story. But from the material standpoint, the onus of support which falls on him, and which, in the case of an invalided or of an obnoxious wife, may prove nothing but a carking care, makes the liabilities unequal.