Author: Arabella Kenealy
Date: 2026-02-06T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Women's Rights
Description: Feminism and Sex-Extinction is a book by Arabella Kenealy, first published in 1920. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Kenealy—a qualified physician and daughter of a prominent pro-feminist writer—presents a provocative and controversial critique of the early feminist movement. The book explores the biological and sociological consequences of women entering traditionally male spheres of labor and influence, arguing that the blurring of gender roles could lead to a decline in human vitality and social stability. This work serves as a fascinating primary source for those
Publisher: Global Grey ebooks

Feminism and Sex-Extinction
by Arabella Kenealy

First published in 1920

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Contents

Foreword

Book 1. Woman’s Part In Human Evolution

1. Impassioned Fallacies Of Feminism

2. Increasing Differences Between Male And Female Sex-Characteristics And Functions Are The Main Feature Of Human Advance

3. The Mystery Of Sex And Sex-Transmission

4. One Side Of Body Is Male, The Other Side Is Female

5. Masculine Mothers Produce Emasculate Sons By Misappropriating The Life-Potential Of Male Offspring

Book 2. Woman’s Part In Human Decadence

1. Decline And Fall Of Ancient Civilisations Due To Feminism

2. The Evolution Of Sex In Adolescence

3. The Extinction Of Sex In Adolescence

4. The Woman Brain: Its Powers And Disabilities

5. Male And Female Sex-Instincts And Morale Diametrically Different

6. Feminist Doctrine And Practice Disastrous To Infant-Life And Human Faculty

7. Feminist Doctrine And Practice Destructive Of Womanly Attributes, Morale And Progress

8. Dangerous Separation Of Women Into Two Orders: Feminists And Femininists

9. The Impending Subjection Of Man

Appendix

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.

Book 1. Woman’s Part In Human Evolution

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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:

Height.

Weight.

St. Matthew’s

Cornbrook Park

St. Anne’s

Trafford Park

Gorse Hill

Seymour Park

Boys 4ft. 7¾in.
Girls 4ft. 9in.
Boys 4ft. 8½in.
Girls 4ft. 10-1/3in.
Boys 4ft. 7in.
Girls 4ft. 9in.
Boys 4ft. 7¾in.
Girls 4ft. 9½in.
Boys 4ft. 8½in.
Girls 4ft. 10in.
Boys 4ft. 8-2/3in.
Girls 4ft. 10in.

5st. 7¾lb.
5st. 10¾lb.
6st. 0lb.
6st. 5½lb.
5st. 3¾lb.
5st. 10½lb.
5st. 4lb.
5st. 8½lb.
5st. 10lb.
5st. 11lb.
5st. 0lb.
5st. 11lb.

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.

Book 2. Woman’s Part In Human Decadence

1. 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!

2. 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!”

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

It is, doubtless, because of these his greater material obligations and responsibilities, that passion has been planned to beset man more urgently than woman. And had Church and State not taken advantage of his inherent, chivalrous instinct, and so turned it to account, both for his own moral uplifting and for the founding and maintenance of the family, woman and society—and man, accordingly—would have remained at very low grades of development.

II

Among other “wrongs” resented by women is that his obligation and his economic means to support a wife have endowed the male, in the majority of cases, with the lordly prerogative of selecting his mate. On her side, while having much to gain materially by marriage, unless she is unusually attractive she has but little range of choice.

And yet this masculine prerogative of selection has served as the strongest incentive to the culture both of higher attribute and charm in woman. Failing that economic struggle which has been man’s spur to development, this incentive has operated vastly to her benefit; inducing her parents to educate and to enhance her gifts, and influencing her to do the like for herself. A proportion of women have always been self-supporting, of course. But their work has been mainly in fields of unskilled labour, and has lacked, accordingly, the stimulus of competition. The goal of marriage has not only supplied thus the element of emulation, but it has turned Woman-culture in the direction of developing personal traits and morale, rather than industrial or professional specialisations. And this has been the right direction, seeing that the rôle of the sex is one demanding personal qualities and virtues rather than economic technicalities.

As regards human values, it is a higher privilege to be a charming personality than to be a successful stockbroker. So that in this, as in other things, woman has been privileged by her disabilities.

III

An ever-increasing number of working-class girls, on leaving school, enter a work-shop, a factory, or an office, and spend their time and powers in minor mechanical tasks; gumming labels on jam-pots, making match-boxes or tags for boot-laces, addressing envelopes, and other such employments, deadening to female intelligence, impulse and temperament. Their minds and natures become too warped and narrowed to adapt later, with ease and interest, to the many and varied intelligent functions of the home. They escape thence, accordingly, after a few months or years of marriage (supposing them to have given up their industrial tasks for a space even), and abandoning home and children, return to the old narrow, mechanical routine, to which alone their poor stultified brains have been shaped. In the education of girls, the Subconscious mimetic element in their impressionable natures should be borne in mind. It may be turned to excellent, as to disastrous account.

M. Vologotsky, head of the Omsk Government, has called attention to a significant phenomenon of modern Russian life—namely, that the women take no interest in their homes. This he attributes to their low states of culture. Could they but be persuaded to become “house-proud”—with all that this means and entails—he considers that the task of the Regeneration of this vast unhappy, although singularly gifted, people would be greatly furthered.

Constitutional deterioration, inherited or acquired, entailing defective sex-development, causes many young working-women to be deficient in the maternal instinct, whence spring fondness for and interest in children. The same defective sex-development, disqualifying them for wifehood, results in the vast majority of working-class wives lapsing, after a few years of marriage with normal, virile young men, into haggard, neurasthenic wrecks.

The whole of this vital and important department of the woman-organisation is not only ignored in so far as scope for normal development is concerned, but, despised as subserving inferior and “merely physical” functions, every other capacity and aptitude is fostered or forced at the expense of constitutional reserves and resources which belong, by rights of Life and Love, to this. With the result that the vast majority of modern women are physically unfitted for, as an increasing number are temperamentally averse to the sex-relation—fons et origo of Life.

IV

To such degree the doctrine of Expedience and Self-for-Self-solely has spread that there are women who seek now to escape wholly the natural pangs of childbirth. Such persuade their doctors to induce labour a month or more before term; in order that the smaller-sized infant may be born with less discomfort to themselves. Others restrict their diet or abstain from certain foods, in order that the babe, starved thus and ill-nourished before birth, shall be soft and frail and easier of delivery. Dread of pain at whatsoever cost to the future of a human being—and that being their own child—actuates these unnatural and pusillanimous practices.

It is becoming a vogue for expectant mothers of the wealthier classes to enter Maternity-Homes, where, in luxurious surroundings, they are enabled, under spinal anæsthesia (Twilight Sleep), to conclude their mother-function without suffering or inconvenience; lying in a torpor of crass insensibility while the greatest of Human Events is taking place in them. Meantime, the sensitive infant-body is dosed with the powerful drug circulating in the maternal blood.

But—whither is all this trending? Can we believe that true intelligence and progress consist in grasping greedily all the pleasures and the privileges to be had from life, and basely shirking all the hardships? Can we believe that—suffering and effort being the laws alike of Life and Progress, and the rungs whereby we have climbed the Evolutionary ladder—we can continue to climb when, with short-sighted selfishness, we shall have stripped the ladder of its rungs? The humane use of chloroform duly assuages the worst pangs. While the fine courage, fortitude and sweetness wherewith the soul of woman fares forth naturally upon her Great Adventure, to meet this the Apotheosis of human pain, prove and still further enhance her nobility. Even weak and flimsy women rise to greatness at this crisis. Powers they had never glimmered in themselves emerge and armour them, and—be it remembered—leave eternal records upon mind and character; striking spiritual roots still deeper into living function.

V

With characteristic Feminist materialism, Olive Schreiner lightly dismisses Maternity as a merely “passive” form of labour.

Heaven save the mark! Is it passive so to equip a microscopic cell with living human powers and aspirations that, within the space of months, it makes that miraculous pilgrimage of the pre-natal evolutionary ascent whereby it becomes Man? Passive—so to serve for living environment to this developing organism as to supply it with the multiple, complex and diverse elements, material and vital, biological and psychical, required for the manifold needs and adjustments of its evolving life and faculties?

During the ante-natal months of this miraculous Ascent, the embryo “climbs its genealogical tree,” as biologists style it. That is to say, it passes, in turn, through all the countless evolutionary phases of all the countless evolutionary ages whereof Humanity is the culminating product. Fashioning out of formlessness, slowly it attains to form. Shaping, shaping, ever marvellously shaping, it evolves, in succession, through fish, amphibian and other rudimentary life-grades. Climbing, climbing, ever marvellously climbing, day by day, to nobler heights, it is transformed at last to human shape; lower human first, then higher human, and finally to the highest human possible to its stock, its parentage, and the resources, physical and psychical, available to it.

It is the most stupendous miracle in Nature; a miracle so sacred and so tender that every man in passing an expectant mother should mentally bow the knee. Individually, socially, morally—she may be a person of but small significance. But because of the mystery of Life enshrined within her, she is a living Testament of Evolution. The pregnant woman is, moreover, pregnant with the destiny of Races.

During those ten lunar months there is enacted in the tender darkness of the mother’s womb the whole wonderful drama of the Human transfiguration. With lightning swiftness, the evolving babe climbs in the footsteps that its countless ancestors had trod, in forms innumerable, along the route interminable of the Human Advent. In flashes of progressive, infinitesimal transitions, through incalculable phases and mutations, the single cell of double parentage unfolds the marvel occulted in it. Until at last, the living product stands triumphant on the topmost branch of its genealogical tree, a perfect human babe awaiting birth; the last achievement of its Race, the latest and most perfect bud of its hereditary stock.

In so far as all this occurs subconsciously within the mother, the materialist may lightly dismiss the evolutionary marvel as a “passive” form of labour. But although subconscious, these unceasing processes demand inevitably such proportional vital potential and activities on her part from whom the powers energising it are derived, as to be a continued tax and strain upon her strength and health. There are women who feel this strain but little. A rare few of these because they are so richly endowed with maternal potence that the subconscious processes have remained, as Nature doubtless intended, for the most part subconscious and painless. Far more often, however, when Maternity exacts but little from the mother, it is because she is contributing but little to the child. I have observed that the finer a child in physique and in brain, the greater the stress and disability the mother had suffered prior to its birth.

VI

Indifferent, notwithstanding, to all the vital activities and psychical evolutions taking place within the mysterious laboratory of the mother’s body; reckless of the circumstance that any interference with, or hampering of the least of these must inevitably jar, and warp, the delicate complexes of infantine development, we scruple not to strain and burden, to harass and deplete, the prospective mother even further by strenuous breadwinning. Her whole physiology and psychology are profoundly altered by her momentous condition; by the new adjustments to the needs of the developing babe, of the maternal circulation and digestion, assimilation and elimination, mentality and intricate nervous constitution and processes. Fatigue, noise, turmoil, effort, shock—any one or all of these which are inseparable from industrial employment—cannot but injuriously re-act upon the delicate evolutions mysteriously occurring in her.

The infant brain is complete at birth. From its lowest to its highest departments, all the marvel of exquisitely-delicate construction and association of its complex cells is achieved pre-natally. And according or not as her vital powers have been rich and otherwise unexpended, and according or not as the embryological processes of development have occurred in quietude and freedom from strain upon the mother’s part, will be the quality for life, in vigour and in sanity, of her child’s intelligence and character.

VII

In view of those lower biological grades through which the embryo passes before arriving at the human stage, it is inevitable that maternal over-fatigue, shock or undue effort may arrest its physical development temporarily upon any of these lower levels. And such arrest must inevitably entail some warp or bias of a lower animal phase; which may so impress itself permanently on embryonic development as to detract more or less gravely from the final transition.

It is, doubtless, for this reason that many modern humans show in their configuration, degrees of reversion to ape, sheep, fish and other lower species.

Shock or nervous perturbation in the expectant mother may occasion, in the babe, appalling monstrosity, or such minor defects as cleft-palate, hare-lip, and other deformities. Showing the vital and—inevitably—the psychological effects on offspring, for good or for evil, of maternal conditions and impressions.

The Germans record that of infants born during the war, a number are gravely degenerate of type, an infant-degeneracy attributed by some to the creed of Hate obsessing German mothers. The same phenomenon is seen however in the offspring of mothers exhausted by religious preachings and marchings, in furtherance of their creed of Christian Love.

For Biology recognises no Theology except its own—that of Evolution.

At a representative meeting of London doctors, it was stated recently that the number of imbecile infants now coming into existence with us is no less than appalling.

A medical wiseacre has adventured the amazing dictum that Every infant is born healthy! He might, with equal truth, have said that every infant is born wealthy, or is born a Chinaman. Some infants are born alive, a great number are born dead. And between those born alive and healthy and the still-born, lie all the infinite gradations of constitutional condition between life and health, between disease and death.

One child inherits from its parents a tuberculous tendency; another a neurotic, another a strain of alcoholism or other taint. One is born blind or a hopeless idiot; another with hare-lip or clubbed-foot; another with congenital heart-disease. One babe is born with a beautiful head; all its brain-faculties nobly developed and splendidly balanced. Another is born headless, or with a skull which, from crown to brows, is a rapid descent—showing lack of all the brain-powers involved in higher mentality; is born, in short, of criminal inherency.

The degrees in which individuals strive against inherited tendencies differ greatly, as do the life-conditions wherein their will and moral power are tested—to make or to break them. Man is not, of course, the creature merely of his heredity or of his environment. But he whose mother has equipped him with physical defects instead of with qualities, even though he fight against his disabilities, is obviously handicapped for the life-struggle. A great musician may charm fine music from a poor fiddle, but in no degree so fine as he will bring out of a more perfect instrument.

VIII

A phenomenon which has baffled vital statisticians is a curious relation between the Birth-rate and Infant-Mortality. A high birth-rate is found to be associated with a high rate of infant-mortality; while with a lower birth-rate, the death-rate among infants and children decreases.

Long and careful observation has left me in no doubt as to the cause of this phenomenon. Which is, that under strain of disease, of industrial exhaustion or strenuous activities of any sort, but particularly as result of the constitutional drain entailed by pregnancy, mothers may so draw upon the vital powers of their children in order to recruit their own, as to occasion fatal illness in their families.

The evil is so great in its effects, not only upon the health and constitution of the rising generation, but, as well, upon the physical and mental development thereof, that such maternal depletion is, I am assured, a cause of widespread disease among children; of infantile paralysis, degeneracy and mortality. It is reason enough, in all conscience, to call for the legalised prohibition of all mothers with young families from engaging in professional or industrial employment.

Because although such depletion of her children’s health is graver in degree during a mother’s pregnancy, at all times over-worked, sickly, or strenuous women recruit their powers from the constitutional resources of others. Only, indeed, by such depletion of their neighbours can many of our present-day neurotic, overactive women (some of them with ill-nourished bodies and feeble assimilation, but with, nevertheless, indefatigable energies) contrive to keep going.

Strong-willed, self-centred women, keen in pursuit of business, athletics or pleasure, will, by sapping the nervous forces of these, keep all the members of their households—husband, children, servants—more or less de-vitalised, neurasthenic and characterless; one or more actually invalided, perhaps.

If nervous energy is, indeed, a complex form of electrical energy, this nervous interchange is intelligible; obeying the law that bodies under-charged with electricity charge themselves from bodies more highly charged, until equilibrium is established.

Who among doctors does not know the wan and listless, semi-paralytic babes that working-mothers—and most particularly pregnant working-mothers—bring to the consulting-room? The hapless victims lie limply, or sit hunched upon the woman’s lap, nerveless, wasted, apathetic; faces white and hopeless, abdomen lax and tumid; the blenched limbs soft as butter, weak and dangling. They are suffering, perhaps, from some specific ailment, bronchitis, paralysis, gastric or intestinal troubles; perhaps only from mysterious wasting and inanition. Not seldom there is an elder child too, white and weak and fretful, and the subject of “infantilism”; growth stunted, development arrested. Such children, in their mental hebetude and physical degeneracy, suggest a degree of cretinism. And in the suggestion, a possible cause appears for the cretinous offspring of the hard-living, over-worked mothers of Swiss cantons.

IX

Drummond says of Motherhood:

“Even on its physical side ... this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook.”

While on the physical side, we see that Nature has made infancy and childhood increasingly helpless as species advances in evolutionary values, in order to call forth increasingly intelligent, and sympathetic response and resource in the mother. Feminism in unmaking the mother, is undoing the labours of countless ages of evolutionary advance. The intensifying mentality of woman, destined for the more subtly intelligent and sympathetic nurture of the Race’s increasingly valuable and complex offspring, is being diverted, more and more, by Feminist counsel and practice from human and vital into merely economic channels.

Life is so constituted that its most cruel disabilities and evils are borne inevitably by the children in the van of the Great March. These hapless ones it is—soft buds pushing from the Human Tree—that bear the brunt of the evolutionary impulse.

In the main, the very finest children of The Poor succumb. Because the higher the organism, the more complex and delicately-fitted to its vital needs its life-conditions require to be. Briars flourish where rose-trees die. Degenerate children struggle through where better types go under. We are not ready, it is true, for exotic humans. But we need urgently, indeed, all the healthy, intelligent, well-balanced stock we can produce.

A certain uniformity of type is secured by the expedients of Natural Selection; by that continual correction of premature evolutionary unfoldment which results from the checks and prunings of developmental exigencies—in the necessary acclimatisation and adaptation of the young and tender organism to environment. And Nature herself provides all the checks and prunings required, in her tests of teething, of measles, and the other diseases and trials of infancy and childhood.

The respiration-curves and the brain pulse-waves of young infants show serious disturbance as result of sudden loud noises. The consequent nervous jar perturbs both breathing and circulation.

The whole organisation of an infant is so delicate and is so subtly balanced as to require the gentlest possible treatment. One sees on the faces of infants and young children a chronic look of painful expectancy. Their brows are knitted as though to brace their hyper-sensitive systems for the next distressing shock. Women accustomed to hard, laborious work (or sports) lose power to adjust their movements to these delicate needs. And when, unkind and impatient, they fly at the unfortunates and shake or beat or scold them violently, they have no suspicion that for hours afterwards, perhaps for days, the children’s nervous systems may be so shattered and disorganised, digestion and assimilative powers so impaired, as to interfere gravely with growth and development. Degrees of “shock,” akin to shell-shock, result from such maternal violence and chronic terrorism; occasioning feeble-mindedness, morbid timidity, mental hebetude and, moreover, subconscious impressions, which, later in life, may emerge as obsessions, or as other forms of insanity. Fear is the most shattering and paralysing of the emotions. Yet not only brought up by hand, the majority of our little ones are brought up by violent hand.

All day long and during every moment of it, a thousand delicate processes of growth and unfoldment and of intricate adjustments are going on mysteriously within the shaping brain and body of a child. Subconsciously, these are a continued tax and strain; making him hyper-sensitive, irritable, cross, perhaps, for causes that appear inadequate. A child is like a convalescent, in that he uses up rapidly for growth and development all the nutritive material and vital energy at his disposal. This is true of healthy, well-nurtured children. What then of these child-martyrs of The Poor, who in addition to the strain of growth, are ill-fed, poisoned by unsuitable foods; are sickly, rickety, bronchitic, dyspeptic, syphilitic, phthisical? Nevertheless, all the maternal care these miserables receive are such rough dregs of kindness and of patience as may be left over from the toil of their working-mothers’ hard, exhausting days.

It is no less than monstrous that our laws allow the nation’s babes and children—to whom are due all the best resources of maternal care and tenderness and duly-trained maternal powers—to be thus martyred. As substitute for the home and for their mothers—which are every child’s birthright—more and more, infants and young children are consigned now to Crèches; chill institutions of alien atmosphere, alien surroundings, alien nurses, where, unmothered, they are ciphers among other unmothered alien ciphers. Yet babies and young children are so pathetically constituted that they prefer blows from their mothers to caresses from strangers.

X

The life-story written in the faces of the great majority of our Twentieth-Century babes and children is a terrible one, in its revelation of tortured helplessness, hopeless resignation, unnatural fortitude, blank despair. See them sunk, limp and dejected, in their prams or go-carts, eyes staring forward on the dreary waste their lives are; limbs dangling, like those of toys with broken springs.

In cities, mothers, ignorant of the shock and injury which noise and turmoil inflict upon these sensitive brains and nerves, wheel them amid jostling crowds—in order that they themselves may enjoy the excitements of the shops. At the low level of their prams, they breathe air vitiated by the passers-by; are in the exhausting whirl and press of swirling nerve-currents. In their poor ill-made carriages, they are jerked abruptly, now up, now down, at every kerb; with no more care or tenderness than though they were baskets of clothes. They sit patient, leaden, apathetic; cruelly strapped for hours together in one position; neither pulse of health nor spirit in them.

In cold weather, their heads but thinly thatched with hair are bare. So too their limbs; though warmth is life to young, developing creatures. In hot weather, the sun beats mercilessly down upon their hatlessness, their exquisitely-sensitive brains but slightly shielded by their thin un-ossified skulls. Degrees of sunstroke, with lifelong injury to health and faculty, occur. They knit their pale brows in fruitless attempt to defend their weak eyes from the glare. Many keep their lids close shut, to protect both eyes and brain from the nerve-shattering solar rays, which are far too powerful to be allowed to fall, untempered, upon an infant’s highly-sensitive body. With closed eyes, the poor things miss all the joys of their ride; the colour and movement about them, and the spurs to intelligence these should supply. Their unobservant mothers and nurses suppose them to be sleeping!

Children old enough to walk are walked to stages—sometimes to extremes of exhaustion. You may see them dragging heavily along, with wan, exhausted faces; peevish and cross, and scolded and shaken and slapped for being peevish and cross. Exhaustion from such over-fatigue will keep a child below par for days; checking its growth and development—to say nothing of its happiness. Children derive but little benefit from their holiday changes to sea or country, because of the exertions forced upon them, or the too strenuous play to which they are exhorted.

Children who go bare-headed suffer, in large number, from eye-strain, with resulting permanent frown. As too, from ear-ache and from ear-diseases; from headache and toothache. In as many as 75 per cent. of school-children, vision is defective.

The obsessing aim of many mothers is to “harden” their children. Yet no more than a clay model in the shaping may be hardened and set, should the process be applied to children in the shaping.

Healthy children are inevitably delicate children, because of that highly-sensitive re-activity to surroundings which not only characterises but conduces to the developmental state. (Such delicacy must not be confused with sickliness.) The finer the organisation the longer it takes (within normal limits) to come to full growth. Our greatest men and women were delicate in youth. Hardy children are always of inferior type—for the most part, plain and shrewd and unimaginative, insensitive, unlovable. They have matured (have adapted to environment, that is) precociously. Evolution of higher faculty has been prematurely arrested in them.

Modern children are described as “super-children,” for their abnormal sharpness and worldly perspicacity. They are merely precocious, which is to say, they have missed their childhood. And too early development entails inevitably early decline. Not only America, but England now has produced a grey-haired boy of ten!

No less amazing than it is lamentable is the light neglect by the majority of cultured mothers, of their grave maternal obligations. From earliest infancy, they hand over their children, body and soul, to the ignorance, the carelessness, the cruelty (not seldom to the viciousness even), of stranger-women of the uncultured classes; women of whose character and disposition they know nothing, and who are only too often unfitted by nature, by upbringing, and by habit for this most delicate, difficult and important of all human tasks.

It is by no means uncommon to find prostitutes, grown too old for a trade that has vitiated every cell and secretion of their bodies (to say nothing of mental vitiation), officiating in the capacity of nursemaid to children of culture.

Every child is a new creation, with a highly specialised organisation of mind and of body. For the nurture and best development of these, are required high degrees of intelligence, of understanding and of sympathy in treatment. To realise its idiosyncrasies, constitutional and temperamental, and to adapt to these in its rearing and surroundings, with respect to diet, exercise, play, sleep, moral supervision and discipline, demand intuitive perceptiveness, intelligent discrimination, and practical resource such as no other department of life demands—or is worth.

Notwithstanding all this, mothers who can afford to shelve their duty upon paid substitutes abandon the most complex and sensitive, the most beautiful and valuable, and moreover, the most helpless thing in Nature—the mind of a child—to be shaped and coloured, during all the most impressionable years of its development, by persons with neither aptitude nor faculty for this supremely complex and difficult function. In place of so adapting its environment to the child-organism as to enable it, fenced within the tender mother-fold, to enjoy to the full and to develop to the full the lovely, inspiring beliefs and illusions of natural childhood, latter-day mothers now cruelly rob their little ones of this fructifying phase, by prematurely forcing worldly knowledge and distrusts upon them, in precocious adjustment to mature view-points and conditions from which they should be carefully secluded.

In that mysterious Mind-department, the Subconsciousness, with its highly sensitised brain-tablets, every smallest happening of a lifetime—scenes, experiences, mental impressions—are photographed, to be stored for ever after as ineffaceable records. And though, perhaps, wholly forgotten, these subconscious records nevertheless colour and influence for ever after every thought and impulse and action. Sometimes they flash up as memories. They can be recalled under hypnotism.

The young mind is like an unfurnished house. The rooms are empty. There are no pictures on the walls. But its unblotted, exquisitely-sensitised spaces are ceaselessly filming indelible records of everything seen and felt and apprehended. One impression may correct, or may distort, others. Or that right point-of-view which is judgment may focus all impressions in the true perspective which reveals their true values and proportions. But until such judgment has been formed by mental development, it is vitally important that all the impressions absorbed by young minds, whether of their life-conditions and associates, of books or of plays, shall be fair and simple and wholesome.

Thus, the foundations of mind and of character are laid in clean, intelligising and uplifting influences.

XI

While we deplore, as appalling, that during the first fifteen months of War, 109,725 of our fighting men were killed or died, the returns of the Registrar-General show that during the twelve months of the peace preceding War, there died 140,957 of the nation’s children, at less than five years old; 95,608 of these at less than a year old.

Consider it! War, with its destructive engines of bomb and shell, more or less swiftly and painlessly kills just over a hundred thousand men, in the course of fifteen months. Peace, with its destructive transgressions against Nature, kills in less time a far greater number of defenceless babes and children, by slow and more or less torturing forms of disease. Babies, even when unhealthy, come into existence endowed with a certain Life-potential. And they struggle hard and painfully to live. It is amazing to see the odds against which the poor things battle; and battle successfully. It is only the fearfulness of the odds to which most of them are subjected that succeeds in killing them.

Pain and suffering are spurs to adult development. In children they are as needlessly cruel as they are permanently injurious. Far from fitting, they unfit them for life.

The ratio of mortality is no guide, of course, to the immeasurable injuries wrought to mind and body by these same fearful odds upon the children who survive; and who survive, maimed, diseased, degenerate, to live out lives of disability, of joylessness and ineffectiveness.

It will be said—and said truly—that much of this high infant-mortality results, not from maternal omissions, but from paternal commissions. Well, that alas! is another of the terrible wrongs against children which lie at the door of the sex. Were there not women whose lives are passed in engendering and transmitting the direst of all the diseases human evil has bred, the hapless imbecile and paralytic, the blind, the deaf, the ulcerous, the slowly-wasting, tortured little ones who fill our asylums and hospitals would not be.

At every turn the truth is more and more impressed, that the fate of Humanity rests, in some or other form, with its women. Woman is Redeemer; or she is Destroyer. Because, while man’s province is the material, with its roots in temporal things, woman’s province is the vital, with its roots and stem and blossom in functioning Life.

The burning wrongs of women? Alas! what are they beside the burning wrongs of helpless babes and children?

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XII

An anomaly of Feminism is the admission, on the one hand, that Motherhood was woman’s most valuable function, and her greatest claim on the community in days of barbarism, and the denial, on the other, that it is her most important function in civilisation.

The illogic of the position is patent.

That the production of savages should be primitive woman’s chiefest claim to honour; while the production of highly-evolved and complex human beings should be civilised woman’s least.

The potence and the values of fine motherhood are proven by the fact that every great, or good, or clever man or woman has been the child of a great, or good, or clever mother. Not of one who has made her mark in the world of affairs. Such, for the most part, have not reproduced at all. And when they have been mothers their children have been notably of inferior calibre.

On the other hand, bad men and bad women have in nearly every instance been sons or daughters of bad women.

Examples innumerable might be cited to show that both genius and moral greatness are variations (mutations) of the human species which have their origin in mother-genius and greatness.

Great scientists, it has been noted, have been sons of women characterised by intense love of Truth. The love of Truth in the mother—for Truth’s sake—became in the executive, concrete mentality of the son an intuitive apprehension of the truths of Science, and an eager and indomitable aspiration to render these in terms of intellection.

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Shall woman leave to man no field at all of natural supremacy? Shall she not be content with her beautiful part as generatrix of Faculty, but must seek to be exponent too?

That all women do not marry—cannot marry, indeed, because of their preponderance in number over the other sex—is no reason for dissembling the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie woman’s most vital and valuable rôles.

Nor is it warrant for training the whole sex as though none were destined to fulfil this, their natural and noblest—if not always, their happiest vocation.

XIII

Feminism repudiates, from time to time, the charge against it of belittling Motherhood. Yet how can it profess to credit the maternal function with due values or significance when it denies the obligations and responsibilities thereof, asks no economic concessions for it? And when, in place of demanding privileges indispensable to its exercise and complete fulfilment, it makes no distinction, in respect of work and the worker, between childless and unmarried women and mothers and expectant mothers? And this despite the fact that, for a period of eighteen months at very least, the mother’s best vital resources belong by rights, biological and moral, to each babe she produces—nine for the pre-natal building of its body and brain, and nine for lactation.

Her moral obligation to nurse, and the criminality of her omission when able to do so, have been emphasised as follows by Sir J. Crichton-Browne:

“Dr. Robertson, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham has shown that while the infant-mortality of breast-fed infants is 7·8 per 1000 births, that of infants receiving no breast-milk is 232 per 1000. And Sir Arthur Newsholme, Medical Adviser to the Local Government Board, has shown that the probability of death from epidemic diarrhœa is 54 times greater among infants fed on cow’s milk than among those fed on breast-milk, and 150 times greater amongst infants fed on condensed milk.

“But it is not merely in a high infant death-rate that the evil effects of the want of breast-milk stand confessed. Where it does not kill it often maims, and is responsible for malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, and a multiplicity of ailments. Every doctor is familiar with the alabaster babies, flabby, limp, languid, and painfully pallid, who have never tasted their natural nutriment.”

Dr. Truby King records the interesting fact that the finest calf-skin, known as Paris Calf, is obtained from calves reared by their mothers, in order to provide the finest veal for Paris. So supple and smooth-haired and superior is the skin of these mother-suckled creatures that dealers are able to distinguish it at once from the skin of calves that have been artificially fed.

About this, Mr. Horace G. Regnart kindly supplies me with the following significant data:

“If we feed a calf, ‘on the bucket,’ the calf’s coat loses its shine and becomes dull. We say it is ‘dead.’ A couple of days is sufficient to deaden the coat. And it takes three weeks or a month ‘on a cow’ to get the gloss back. A quart of milk direct from the cow is as good as a gallon of milk out of a bucket.

“We do not attempt to feed our female calves so well as we feed the bulls. It is too costly. Our heifers are put on ‘the bucket’ when three days old. I buy a cow to rear my bull-calves on. I once reared a bull on ‘the bucket’ satisfactorily. But I gave him twelve gallons of new milk every day after he was five months old, and kept it up till he was fourteen months. One cow that gives three gallons does a calf just as well as twelve gallons viâ the bucket, and is much cheaper. Some crack bulls have three and four five-gallon cows at once, and go to Shows with all their nurses in attendance.

“Once I reared a bull as we rear the heifers. But he was a failure. His daughters are only half the size they ought to be.”

(An example of direct developmental inheritance—in terms of deterioration—from father to daughter.)

XIV

Comparing a calf with a human baby, it becomes self-evident that the diet suited for the large, crude creature which trots about on four legs shortly after birth must be wholly unsuited to the delicate digestion and the subtle psychological needs of the small and complex, highly-organised human infant, which remains so long a helpless infant.

The all-important proteid of every order of creature differs from that of every other. Before any form of alien proteid can be built into the body of a living organism, the digestion and assimilation of this creature must first have laboriously disintegrated and reconstructed it to the form of its own individual proteid.

The Irish tradition that persons not nursed during infancy by their mothers are beings without souls has much to justify it. Even the ill-nourished, sickly babes of working-mothers have an essentially human look in eyes and features, possess far more of nervous power, and are of appreciably higher and more intelligent psychology than are the bottle-fed infants of the cultured.

The bottle-fed start handicapped for life, both in constitution and mentality. It is safe to say that all great men and women have been suckled by their mothers or have come of stock thus humanly nurtured. That they were thus humanly nurtured during their momentous first nine months of life, is the reason, doubtless, why so many of our greatest men have sprung from humble origin.

The incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she has borne should be known for a mark of degeneracy—sign, too, that she was unfitted to have borne a child, because deficient in the vital reserve requisite to carry her maternal function to its normal biological and psychological conclusion. Just as a statesman or a general would be held unfitted for his function, if he should lack the physical and mental enterprise to complete his national undertakings.

That for the nine months preceding its birth the infant obtains its nourishment directly from its mother’s blood, and for nine months after birth it obtains this, normally, from her milk—her digestive processes having so assimilated the originally brute and vegetable proteids of her food that these are now human proteids, and are ready, therefore, to be built into the infant’s body with the least possible tax upon its own assimilative powers—proves a number of important facts.

First: that an infant’s digestive powers remain, normally, for nine months after birth, in a more or less embryonic state; slowly and gradually developing capacity to convert the products of the brute and vegetable kingdoms into forms suitable for building into its human organisation. (Just as we see the digestive organs of the child progressively developing power to assimilate an adult dietary.)

Secondly: that the infant’s digestion remains thus undeveloped obviously in order that as little as possible of its vital power may be expended in the complex processes of assimilation, all available vital-power being urgently required for its exhaustingly rapid brain- and body-building.

Thirdly: that where an artificial diet forces precocious development upon the infant-digestion—since all precocity is degeneracy, all the organs concerned in digestion will be, necessarily, more or less structurally defective and functionally inefficient; as a consequence of not having been permitted time and rest to develop slowly and stably over the normal allotted period. (Proof is supplied by the premature development of teeth, which occurs in artificially-fed babies some months before dentition is normally due. And these teeth and those that succeed them are of such perishable structure that present-day children need perpetual dental repairs.)

Fourthly: that such misapplication of vital resources for the premature development and abnormal functions of precocious digestive organs entails inevitably corresponding loss of vital power for general development.

Fifthly—and by no means lastly, but perhaps most important of all: that since the infant-digestion is quite incapable of properly converting brute and vegetable-proteids into human proteid, infants artificially fed must necessarily build into their brains and bodies lower-grade proteids—and proteids so imperfectly assimilated as to be something less than human, and, accordingly, more or less brute or vegetable still in their inherences. And since all living cells and tissues reproduce upon the plan of the parent-cells and tissues they were derived from, it is clear that the abnormal cells and tissues constructed of these half-brute, or half-vegetable proteids must be abnormal; unstable and degenerate, and prone to lapse readily to still further degrees of deterioration and disease.

Hence a source of our neurotic, neurasthenic, adenoid-afflicted, mentally-defective and otherwise diseased children. Hence too the increasing criminality—which is animality, of course—that characterises a considerable proportion of the rising generation.

Each further generation artificially fed in infancy can but deviate still further from the Human Normal, becoming ever less human; brain and body-cells reproducing themselves, throughout life, on the plan of their infant-construction of half-brute or half-vegetable proteids. One sees the ox in the dull, soulless eyes, in the bovine flesh, the stolid faces, and in the crude animal natures of many modern little ones, to whom calf-diet was fed before they had developed the digestive power of transforming this into substance highly vitalised enough for human brain and body-building. And the less their systems have rebelled against and have rejected, but, on the contrary, have conformed to and have thriven upon such brute-diet, the cruder are their organisations. Of this order are the insensate child-monsters who win prizes at Baby-shows.

To one who realises that, of all the powers of Woman, the ability to nurse her babe is second in importance only to her first and vital function of producing it, the cry and clamour and impassioned fallacy that have swirled around the trivial detail of her Suffrage-disabilities show grotesque beside the human tragedy of her increasing biological disability and her increasing psychical aversion to fulfil this indispensable and sacred mother-office. To despise which, as being a function woman possesses in common with the humbler creatures, is as narrow-sighted as it would be to scorn the genius of Shakespeare because both dog and pig, poor things! possess brains. Moreover, in forfeiting this maternal faculty, woman reverts to the mode of those crude rudimentary species below the Mammalia.

“... Each mother’s breast
Feeds a flower of blue, beyond all blessing blest.”

Notwithstanding all this, Feminism, in its grim materialism, blind to the mystical beauty of Life and the sacredness of Individuality, regards women mainly as parts of an economic machinery. And to serve as such, it standardises all in body, mind and aptitude, to economic ends; the young and tender girls whose shaping frames are shaping to become the mystical looms of evolving Humanity; the young wives in whom love and marriage have set mysterious processes in motion; the young pregnant mothers in whom the shuttle of Life is already marvellously flying, interweaving the luminous threads of a soul with a body of flesh.

Nature made women ministrants of Love and Life, for the creation of an ever more healthful and efficient, a nobler and more joyous Humanity. Feminism degrades them to the status of industrial mechanisms, whereof the commercial products are the chiefest values, and children no more than bye-products.

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And what bye-products they are! God help them!—Who alone can help them—this pathetic rubble of pallid, sickly, suffering, and dejected infant- and child-Life; the violet-hued babies, with their dull eyes glazed by misery, their leaden, half-paralysed limbs; the blind and crippled, halt and deaf, the imbecile and feeble-minded children, apathetic, neurasthenic, joyless; as too, on the other hand, the low-browed, sturdy and soulless, or the debased and evil—All the generation of degeneracy which our deteriorate and enfeebled looms of womanhood are grinding out to-day.

Though shut from sight and thought, in the prisons, hospitals and other institutions of our modern civilisations is an ever-swelling, ever-rising, further-menacing tide of diseased, defective, insane and criminal mankind, product of ours and of those others’ violations of Natural Law; clogging the River of Life, choking the Springs of Evolution, damming the current of Progress.

7. Feminist Doctrine And Practice Destructive Of Womanly Attributes, Morale And Progress

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*         *         *         *         *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wagner said, “Music is a Woman.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Dangerous Separation Of Women Into Two Orders: Feminists And Femininists

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. The Impending Subjection Of Man

“The Earth never tires.... Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first;
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d;
I swear to you there are Divine Things more beautiful than words can tell.”

Walt Whitman.

I

In the long and painful history of man’s more or less total failure to value and to honour woman for her greatest, her most vital and self-sacrificing part in human affairs, none has approached in obliquity his recent deplorable blunder of awarding her the suffrage and the right to sit in Parliament, as recognition of her War-services.

All the long ages of Mother-surrender, of quiet heroism and attainment, all the best, beautiful years of women’s lives which the burden and sickness, the weariness, danger and anguish have devoured down the centuries, while the mothers were giving themselves to be the nation’s bone and blood and brain, to nourish, cherish, and upbring it—All were passed over without word or sign.

Not for her long ages of devoted duty to the nation’s sick and helpless, for rearing and safeguarding its priceless infant and child-life, for administering its homes—fashioning, cleansing, beautifying, contriving, making the utmost of its means and ends—Not for her inestimable services as man’s good comrade and wise counseller, his love and friend and faithful help, in sorrow, evil and adversity; not even for her age-long, arduous labours and achievements in Religion, Charity, Reform. For none of these, her great intrinsic and eternal ministries to Life and to Humanity, has man now set her by him in the Van of Things.

But for filling shells and felling trees, for turning lathes and driving motors, ploughing fields and lighting street-lamps—all valuable duties, it is true, in the crisis we have passed through, and indispensable to carrying on the nation’s business. Yet what a drop from the supreme and tender to the trite and banal, from the vital and essential to the merely incidental, is seen in this belated recompense.

Not woman, Generatrix of Humanity and inspiration of all that is fairest in Humanity, has been now honoured—but woman the bus-conductor, ticket-clipper, clerk and agricultural labourer, woman in breeches and workman’s overall, woman whom German frightfulness had dislocated for a space from her high lot and labours; twisting her powers awry to fit a hideous revulsion of barbarism.

How, if the gods ever laugh at the fantastic tricks of poor mankind, they must now have laughed (or wept) over the opportunity that one sex had—and forfeited—to requite the other’s finest merit.

How deeply-moving and far-reaching in its impulse and its inspiration would have been the tribute, had it been made in reverent gratitude to the mothers-of-men who had saved the world by mothering the men who saved the Empire—For achievement stamped with the high and unique quality of service that woman alone could have rendered. And not because, when tested by men’s standards, she proved herself a worthy second-best in doing things that men have always done.

The gods must long have wept, I think, that men had thought so lightly of the women living every day beside them, surrendering their lives and powers, their interests, desires and individuation; toiling over cooking-pans and wash-tubs, tied for years to children’s cots, for life to some or another person’s sick-bed; smothering talents, impulse, hopes, impatiences, to find the soft and simple word; solacing, inspiring, making-believe above an aching spirit and a breaking heart that all was fair and well with the world. And, moreover, in every generation making these beautiful fictions ever a fraction more truth and less fiction. For the gods alone know how that kindlier, purer and more tender Home-environment which women have created in men’s stony-hearted cities involves the most laborious, heart-wearing, complex and widest exercise of faculty of any human task.

Women themselves had long been tiring of it; stung to the soul and mortified by centuries of man’s ingratitude—when not contempt. Nevertheless, where love and duty did not, chains of custom and tradition bound them faithful to their oars.

Till German Frightfulness releasing them, the cry is now:

Since you can do something better and more profitable than merely to row the old Galley of Life—since you can do men’s work, forsooth, come out into the market-place and help us pay our big War-Bill!

And yet—Whither will drift the Galley of Life when its rowers put their strength elsewhere?

II

In the haze of false sentiment exaggerating—not the value of masculine work done by the sex during War, because this was, of course, invaluable and indispensable, but exaggerating, absolutely, the values of this work as compared with the woman’s work it had been doing previously, the decision to admit women to Parliament was a precipitate and an ill-considered measure, by no means innocent of party motive.

Threatening, as it does, a drastic sweep of all political, economic and every other difference between the standards, training, and employment of the sexes, it was pressed forward, nevertheless, not only with characteristic masculine failure to recognise the vital significance of the other sex in Human Things, but in utter blindness to social and racial consequences, immediate and remote, which make it possibly the most momentous decision ever arrived at in the history of human progress.

Showing how little it was known for the turning-point in our great destiny, the question was debated with unseemly levity, while less than half the parliamentary members troubled (or had hardihood) to record their votes; the abstention of the others proving which way blew the straws of their faint wills. And of those voting in favour, half, perhaps, did so (as some confessed) under intimidation of otherwise losing their seats. (What would be said of the soldier who should turn his back upon the enemy for fear of losing life even?)

No more than twenty-five found courage to say their “No’s” like honest gentleman.

Yet far from Enfranchisement having been a burning need blazing in the hearts of women, their newly-awarded vote required to be spurred and whipped out of all but a small minority. Or coaxed from them by abandoning appeal on all the wider issues of Imperial and national policy, and, in so far as their interest was sought, by reducing the programme to personal and domestic issues—electric lighting in their parlours, hot-water taps in their kitchens, and so forth.

And here was seen, at once, the threat of a grave and an increasing diversion from that purely political outlook of men, which should be impersonal in issue, broad in enterprise. Not that the human and domestic side is a whit less momentous than the more abstract and national. But appealing to a different order of mind, it demands that different order of mind which characterises the woman-sex, to deal with it effectively.

The plea that women will acquire in time the masculine political view-point threatens, on the other hand, the loss in them of their own highly-specialised and invaluable interests, morale and qualities; which, being womanly of impulse and of trend, make for the individual welfare, happiness and elevation of the nation’s members.

III

As with every other human function, there are two departments of politics. And the House of Commons represents man’s.

It stands for all that is best accomplished politically by his highly-specialised order of brain; by his concrete energy and initiative, his justice and rationalism, his power of administration, and his uncompromising sternness—pitilessness, if need be—to deal with and to punish crime and aggression, national and international. It stands, in a word, for that virile outlook and the virile grip in Statesmanship which are indispensable to materialise a people’s prosperity and to pioneer its progress. These are the functions of men. Just as the Army and Navy, Science and Commerce, are the functions of men. Because the male bent and intellect are those best fitted to raise these developments to their highest and most effective issues, just as the male physique and energy are best fitted to achieve these issues in material results.

Had anything been needed to emphasise the values of such virile characteristics in the administration of a nation’s policy, the War furnished it. And the many blunders and vacillations marring the conduct of the War emphasised the lack of these invaluable masculine qualities in the concurrent House of Commons. Army, Navy, and Air-Services proved their manhood doughtily in their respective provinces. Had they been supplemented by an equally virile Statesmanship, the War, having begun, would have been brought to a speedy termination. In point of fact, it would never have begun.

If now, our British politics are already so lacking in the manly ability and grip indispensable to national permanence and progress, the presence of women in Parliament can but further emasculate these. It may be said that some women outside the House are more male of mind and mode (not to speak of muscle) than are some men inside. But this is reason, surely, for replacing these weak males by stronger ones, rather than for adulterating British statesmanship with Femaleness.

The presence of a masculine woman in a house—whether this be writ with a small or a capital letter—far from stiffening the manly calibre of weak men in it, only further enervates and paralyses them. To serve on a committee of mixed sex is to realise this.

Women should be represented in the counsels of the nation—but not in the councils of men. They should have a House of their own, wherein to foster the interests of women and children mainly, as well as to further The Humanities and The Moralities; which are, at the same time, woman’s true political sphere and her chiefest concern—because she and the child most suffer from failures thereof. Thus, the House of Men would be relieved of problems their sex is unqualified to deal with. While more time and energy would be left them to dispose of affairs they are best fitted to administer.

As already pointed out, the all-potent factor of Sex intervening, members of neither sex are capable of doing their best work while in association with the other. Sex-rivalries are stirred, or sex-antagonisms. Either of which range the sexes on opposite sides; thus precluding amicable co-operation. Or they engender sex-ascendancy. Which, making one sex dominate or defer to the other, precludes intelligent co-operation. Through all, moreover, only too often run threads of intrigue, to entangle and hamper the powers of both.

British politics have notably declined since woman’s incursion therein. British commerce, once supreme among the nations, has notably declined since women entered business-houses. Good and thorough work demands, beyond all things, undivided concentration of the powers upon it. And for nine persons out of ten, this concentration is impossible while in the presence of members of the opposite sex. And emphatically this is true of the male, since woman exercises a hypnotic, and, accordingly, an enervating influence upon him. Worse still, he poses for her: becoming meretricious and insincere. It is held by some that women in Parliament might elevate the codes and modes of latter-day politics, many of our best men withholding themselves therefrom because of bad odour imparted by self-seeking and unscrupulous politicians.

But let us keep our House of Commons a House of men, and make it representative of the nation’s finest manhood. It is the first and foremost function of the sex, the way of national success and progress. And just as the presence of women would blunt the pioneering spirit and cripple the action of a party of Arctic explorers, so women in the House must blunt the enterprise and hamper the exploits of Statesmanship.

So far, the good sense alike of women as of men has declared against the innovation; rejecting, by large majorities, all but one of women Parliamentary candidates. It remains to be seen, however, whether men outside the House will later endorse the new departure, by electing members of the other sex to represent them. A thing impossible for one sex to do for the other, of course, seeing that not only do men and women arrive at their different conclusions by wholly different routes, but all questions bear wholly different values for them.

It may be argued that the existence of dual departments of politics, and dual points-of-view is argument for electing representatives of both sexes to The Commons. Not so, however. Each sex is specialist in its own domain. And an aurist wastes time, and most likely blunders, when he applies himself to treat eye-diseases. An oculist wastes time, and probably blunders, when delicate ear-operations are required of him.

Since by his dual constitution, moreover, man possesses, by inheritance from his mother, the quotum of woman-apprehension, foresight, and altruism required to present the woman-bent and view-point in his outlook and conduct of political and civic affairs, woman’s personal intervention in these is as superfluous as it would be harmful.

Further, there are two orders of men: An order strictly male in trend and talent, and an order whose mentality is tinctured with a higher than average proportion of womanly conservatism, sympathy and intuition. And these two orders of male—typified, respectively, by the Conservative and the Radical parties—perpetually struggling to secure the measures prompted by their respective orders of mind, and intermittently gaining ascendancy, sustain a poise, or mean, between the unduly conservative and traditional, and the unduly radical and transitional in our political administration.

These two orders of mentality are found again in Youth and Age. All healthy and vigorous-minded young men are radical of bias; hot-headed, precipitate and intolerant of crusted orthodoxy, keen to demolish old institutions and established methods. While maturity makes for conservatism. It knows. And having learned by experience the values of institutions which have become institutions because of their values, it is prudent in its counsels of slow and stable reform, in its distrust of drastic, precipitate change, and, beyond all, in its wise misdoubtings of the world in general as being better than it is, and ripe, accordingly, for the best things.

For the present, there are numberless problems and questions of women’s industrial employment, of children’s employment, of the industrial supervision of young girls and their moral protection; problems of female drunkenness and prostitution, crimes of children, crimes against infants and children; questions of health, of the education and upbringing of the young, of dress and conduct, and of the general moral purification and the mental elevation of the Race—with all of which women are essentially qualified to deal; and the vital national importance whereof men have proved themselves as incapable of apprehending as they have shown themselves powerless to administer them.

The two classes of national problems, or the two departments into which most of these problems might be advantageously sub-classed, should be recognised as being the functions, respectively, of the one or of the other sex, and should be deputed for consideration to the House of Men or to the House of Women. With the result that in both, every problem of reform would be dealt with by the sex specialised by nature, by sympathy, and by training, best to understand and best to legislate for it.

As with The Lords, either House should have power to question or to reject the conclusions of the other.

We need urgently, indeed, such a House of Women to employ its native wisdom, its intuitive apprehension, and its moral and emotional impulse, and, moreover, to bring its experience and tact to bear upon a hundred-and-one tangled and neglected issues of moral and social reform. In order to remedy evils that have come, from long neglect, to be a cancer, slowly and surely sapping and vitiating our national life and endangering our racial supremacy.

IV

That women may do useful work in male departments of politics and economics is quite beside the question. Far more valuable work is needed and is possible from them in their own especial fields of aptitude. In these latter, moreover, they would be fostering, in place of sacrificing, that morale and those distinctive talents Nature has specialised in them. While their withdrawal in toto from male political and economic functions would put men on their mettle, and stimulate their efforts and achievement therein.

Woman’s influence, like that of Religion, is most potent when it is indirect and inspirational. Like the Church, when she exchanges her indirect and devotional ministrations for direct and material ones, temporal or militant, she destroys herself or the peoples she dominates. Or she destroys both.

It is common fallacy that so long as the world’s work is done and its affairs tolerably well conducted, it is of no significance whatsoever by which sex these ends are attained.

Sight is lost of the intrinsic truth that Life exists for Man—not Man for Life; its purpose being the evolution of the human Species by way of the evolution of human Faculty. The world’s work has no slightest value save as spur and instrument of human education. And the evolution of the dual orders of human Faculty having differentiated the human Species into two sexes, each representing a wholly different order of Faculty—obviously the perfection of both orders of Faculty and, accordingly, the further evolution of both sexes wherein these orders are respectively specialised, can be attained only by the exercise, by each order, of the rôle and the functions that best evoke its powers. If, therefore, the male sex repudiates its allotted rôle and functions, and forfeits, in consequence, the education of its distinctive talents and moral, by shelving its responsibilities upon the other sex, howsoever capable a substitute this other sex may prove itself, man acts as foolishly and fatuously as the schoolboy who shirks his schooling and the discipline thereof, by enlisting his capable sister to do his lessons for him.

It is, at the same time, man’s duty and his privilege manfully to shoulder and ably to perform his own allotted part in Life’s affairs. Evading this, or from a false conception of chivalry allowing woman to usurp a share therein, he degenerates inevitably; in default of his natural spur to development. Moreover he obliges—or connives at woman doing likewise, in respect of her allotted part.

That he has already grown so slack, his virile pride and enterprise have so far lapsed, as to reconcile him to woman’s usurpation of his masculine functions and prerogatives should warn him of incipient dry-rot in him. As too, the portentous fact that had he not declined in physical and mental calibre, she could never so readily and efficiently have taken his place as we have seen her doing. So efficiently, indeed, that he will be hard put to it to regain and to retain his lost professional and industrial footing, by proving himself appreciably the better man.

As Dr. Havelock Ellis says, if they are to cope with the new Feminism, men must needs look to their laurels and produce a new Masculinism. For truly these weak-chinned, neurotic young men of the rising generation are no match at all for the heavy-jawed, sinewy, resolute young women Feminist aims and methods are giving us.

On every side, in politics, literature, journalism, oratory, commerce, even in scientific invention, women are swiftly coming up abreast of men, and threaten shortly to out-distance them.—And this upon their own ground.

On the other hand, the finer and more exquisite womanly qualities and aptitudes, the emotions and devotions; purity, sweetness, patience, forbearance, tenderness, lovingness and lovableness, together with the courtesies and graces, have fallen out of culture and are fast declining toward extinction. And this, in the measure of the mushroom-growth of masculine abilities and aims and bent, now substituted for them in the sex. With which decline of womanly characteristics, the religion and nobility, virility and chivalry, manly reverence and regard for women, wherewith the true mother illumines the souls of her sons, and which are man’s response to the appeal of true woman, are waning rapidly also.

There is, in all men worth the name, an instinctive recognition that the world’s most strenuous labours and the world’s administration are their natural functions, and that upon their sex, accordingly, rests the responsibility alike of progress or decline in these directions.

This sense of responsibility is both stimulating and uplifting, in the degrees of its realisation and fulfilment. The yielding, by man, to the other sex, of masculine essential rights and obligations is, at the same time, a symptom in him of declining virility, physical and mental, and a cause inevitable of his further speedy decadence. The position yielded, and equality in all things ceded to woman, that pride in his sex, in himself, and in his work, which were his strongest incentives to progress, drop to ever lower grades. Until he comes at last to the state of the decadent savage, who keeps as many wives to work for him as their work for him enables him to keep.

The spirit and pride of Sex are normal and inspiring, and are the expression of that impulse which has directed, in both sexes, the contrary trend of both. No man of mettle feels ever again the same zest or spur to achievement in a rôle that has become equally woman’s. Arrogance? Possibly. But wholesome and energising. Defect of that pride in his man’s mission which inspired Drake, Columbus, Nelson, Cæsar, Shakespeare, Newton, to great conquest. Without it, man ceases to be man. That it is a factor to be reckoned with, was proved by the recent election, which was signalised by being woman’s first authorised entry into the political arena—and was characterised by nothing so much as by man’s indifference, even his neglect to record his vote. And that it is a factor to be reckoned with, is further and seriously proved by the slackness and diminished zest and output of masculine Labour, since the other sex has invaded the field.

Woman, for her part, is characterised by a similar spirit and pride of her sex. Equally she loses it when men intrude upon her province. And this Sex-pride and spirit in her would be nobly intensified and uplifted to ever higher levels of expression and attainment, were she but assured of the fine quality and issues of those woman-faculties and functions, by way of which it is her privilege first to create Life, and afterwards to minister to it.

A potent factor in man’s impotence to hold his own either in moral or achievement, when pitted directly against the other sex, is that power many women exercise of recruiting their vital forces from those of persons—and of men, particularly—in association with them. The highest levels of work and inspiration are the product of reserve and surplus forces. When these are depleted, only languid and lower-grade aims and capacities are possible.

The extent to which over-worked women may impair the health and constitutional vigour of men associated with them in work was strikingly shown during the changed conditions of War. Surrounded by over-wrought girls and women, who kept themselves going by stimulus of nervous excitement, of strong tea or more dangerous drugs, many men, co-workers or heads of departments, became neurasthenic wrecks. Others lapsed to the condition of infirm old men. The like was seen in fathers and husbands of such over-wrought War-workers. And nervous depletion occasioned by working-wives has doubtless much to do with the inanition and depression now crippling our industrial output.

I may be charged with holding a brief for the Enemy-sex. If so, it is not only because man’s cause is woman’s, but, moreover, because his present disposition to surrender his prerogatives all round shows him dangerously blind to the truth of woman’s power; misdirection whereof from its natural channels menaces not only him, but woman herself, and the Race. Find the woman! said the French cynic. Jestingly: because he no more than other men had gauged the profundity of the saying, in all its deep and vast biological phenomena and implications.

Our national survival stands in jeopardy already, indeed, from the lower-grade males—narrow-brained neurotics or feeble-brained neurasthenics—whom latter-day women are producing yearly in tens of thousands. And the deplorable truth of this degeneracy is overlooked, because no more than a fractional number of our doctors distinguish between The Normal and The Average. With the result, that comparing an abnormal with others more abnormal, they declare the less abnormal satisfactory. Of the fine physique, the vital health and faculty, the zest and joy of living which characterise true Normality—and which are the birthright of every human being—only the few have any conception.

It is significant that the sole ancient civilisations now surviving, India and China, have never hazarded their chances of survival by emancipating their women. On the other hand, because their women are in bondage, personally and psychologically, and because their women’s vital powers are exhausted by laborious and de-sexing occupations, the moral and material progress of these peoples is at low ebb.

V

Recruiting statistics have shown us the Damocles-sword of Decadence suspended by a hair above our heads; have shown us our great people so riddled with disease, defect and abnormality, that nearly half our manhood was declared unfitted for man’s elementary duty of fighting for his country (55·9 per cent. only being classed in Grade I.). All that our centuries of evolutionary progress have achieved for us, all that the Race has achieved for itself by faculty and enterprise, integrity and industry, threatens now to be sacrificed to a Feminist fanaticism, which, denying to woman any more vital or tender human faculties or offices than those of man, has increasingly repudiated all else for her than rights to pit her wits and muscles against his.

England has long been, and has once again proved herself supreme among the nations. Because England, more than any other land, had freed her women from the more laborious industrial employments; leaving them, in consequence, more vital power to put into the making of a splendid Race, fine of body, stable of character; the men of it charged with virile energy and enterprise, the women house-proud, home-abiding; faithful wives and admirable mothers.

Recruiting statistics have valuably emphasised the truth that in those localities where women are most employed in labour, there disease and degeneracy are most rampant. Significantly it was shown that colliery-districts and the Universities (the latter with about 80 per cent. of Grade I. men), were conspicuous in providing the greatest number of men qualified for military service. Why? Because neither the mothers of men enrolled in Universities, nor, for the most part, those of colliery-districts, are employed industrially.

While, on the other hand, the health and physique of cotton-mill operatives proved so “alarmingly low” that of 184 weavers and spinners only 57 could even be passed for Army-training. Of 290 examined, only 57 men of one cotton-spinning town were graded I.; only 64 were graded II., while 169 were graded III. and IV.

Again, Why? Because, unlike colliery-districts where the standard of health was notably good, in cotton-towns where physique and health were “alarmingly low” the vast majority of wives and mothers are employed in factories. It is important, moreover, to note that in such gradings of men for military service, even those classed first were by no means necessarily normal or vigorous. On the contrary, many passed were later shown defective, by breakdown under stress of military discipline.

Further, that so many as 20 per cent. of the young manhood of our highest culture were disqualified for Grade I. is a serious circumstance.

Mr. Lloyd George has said regarding this most vital question: “The next great lesson of the war is that if Britain has to be thoroughly equipped to meet any emergencies, the State must take a more constant and a more intelligent interest in the health and fitness of the people. If the Empire is to be equal to its task, the men and women who make up the Empire must be equal to it. The number of B2 and C3 men is prodigious. I asked the Minister of National Service how many more men could we have put into the fighting ranks if the health of the country had been properly looked after. I staggered at the reply: ‘At least a million.’ A virile race has been wasted by neglect and want of forethought, and it is a danger to the State and to the Empire. I solemnly warn my fellow countrymen that you cannot maintain an A1 Empire with a C3 population.”

This estimate of abnormality, by reason of a million of the nation’s young manhood disqualified by definite disease, defect or degeneracy, is far below the mark. Because owing to the urgent need for fighting men, the standard of fitness was compulsorily low. And the estimate takes no account of the huge number of such low-grade “Fit,” who succumbed in death or incapacitation to the strain of military training, or to the vicissitudes of active service.

The British Medical Journal has published figures showing that of 2,080,709 men examined by Medical Boards—the men constituting “a fair sample of the male population between the ages of 18 and 43, and a smaller proportion of the more fit between 43 and 51”—only 1 in 3 could be classed in Grade I. That is, out of every 150 members of our British manhood in its best years of life, only 50 were up to the mark in health and normality.

The Journal comments on “this mass of physical inefficiency, with all its concomitant human misery, and direct loss to the country.”

Sir Auckland Geddes, addressing the Federation of British Industries, stated that “appalling facts about the health of the nation have been disclosed in reports of medical examinations carried out by recruiting authorities.” One of the most startling and disquieting of these disclosures was that of hundreds of thousands of our men, between the ages of 18 and 43, dying of tuberculosis.

Despite all this, however, because our authorities fear to face the truth and the drastic economic upheaval involved in the prohibition of all young wives and mothers from the stress of breadwinning, attempt is being made to shelve the whole blame of this appalling state of national health upon faulty industrial and hygienic conditions; too long hours of work, imperfect ventilation, bad housing, inferior cooking, poor wages, and so forth. All factors, of course, but only contributory to the great vital one. And in order to placate the public conscience, reforms in these directions are promised. Excellent and sadly needed reforms, it is true—in so far as they go; but bound to failure because they will not go to the root of things. They will be tried, no doubt, in our promised Reconstruction-scheme. But being palliative merely, further holocausts of human life and faculty and happiness will be sacrificed in the experiment.

Sooner or later—and Heaven send it be sooner lest it come too late!—the truth must be confronted, and the crisis met. The further the Feminism now threatening our downfall secures footing, however, and more and more diverts the nation’s life-resources into merely economic channels, more and more squanders them in abnormal ambitions and output, the more deeply-rooted and more desperate will have become the cancer of our national decadence. And incalculably the more difficult and dangerous will be the task of its eradication.

The reform should have come while man still held the reins securely in his grasp—ere Feminism had entrenched itself and its deforming aims and powers behind an enfranchised woman-sex; to intimidate and out-number his own. Because women in general, misled by these false standards, and, moreover, deteriorated by de-sexing training, become every year less and less disposed toward home and family-life; less and less willing to burden themselves with the duties and sacrifices indispensable to the proper fulfilment of wife and motherhood. And now, more than ever, when they are still further to be pitted against men in the industrial struggle, woman-instincts and aptitudes will become ever more warped and enfeebled in them.

The Danger menacing us is the graver because, while Disease is the expression of a healthy vital conscience protesting, in terms of pain and disability, against conditions, environmental or personal, adverse to normal states of health and development (and to which the healthy living organism declines therefore to conform), Degeneracy is characterised by a vital conscience of so low an order that it conforms and adapts the type, without pain or protest, to conditions perversive of healthy normality and of further evolutionary advance.

There comes a stage, accordingly, in Racial decline, when the Racial vital conscience no longer rebels, in terms of Disease, but conforms, in terms of Degeneracy, to artificial, abnormal and evil conditions of living, environmental and personal. And then as happened to those mighty civilisations snuffed out before us—the major portion of the community having lapsed from health and normality into decadent states of mind and body, vice and corruption become its Normal both of mind and body. Evil and chaos run riot. Till Nature, defied and transgressed at every turn, opens the vials of her wrath, and pours forth her microbic myriads to sow death and destruction wholesale.

Thus she sweeps from the board of Life another great Race—that had failed.

VI

Already, there are disquieting signs that the physical disease and abnormality among us have engendered such degrees of mental and of moral aberration as may lead at any hour to grave disruption. Below the quiet order of our British constitution are heard, from time to time, the rumble of chaotic and disintegrating forces. With growing frequency, the shriek of anarchy shrills. Red flags break. We shall be truly fortunate if we succeed in bridging over, without more or less serious upheaval, the critical gap between War and Peace.

Woman is Nature’s peacemaker and welder. She it is who, in the home, knits the loose ends of the multiple incongruous and turbulent human elements into social unities—families, friendly communities, townships and peoples—by her annealing powers of affection and sympathy, of charity and intuitive understanding.

“Keep the Home-fires burning!” sang our soldiers. No considerations of The British Constitution, the London Stock Exchange, or Worshipful Civic Company, fired them to heroism, spurred them to victory. But for the Home-fires burning in suburban villas, in four-roomed cottages or two-room lodgings—as equally in hereditary mansions—it was, our gallants dared and died, and reaped their glorious triumph.

My father, an early and an earnest advocate of Female enfranchisement, used to counsel Lord Beaconsfield that to enfranchise women would be to establish the Conservative party for a century, at least. Because nine out of ten women were, in those days, Conservative.

Since then, Feminism has been active, however. Less by way of direct propaganda of anarchy or Bolshevism, be it said, than by fostering that masculine bent and spirit of material unrest and discontent which destroy in women all the finer, fairer ideals and attributes of their intrinsic womanhood, and those self-denying ordinances which so sweeten and dignify the humblest tasks as to content the doers of them with the inspiring sense that they are worth the while. With the result that nothing so characterises the great mass of latter-day working women as a smouldering irrational and intemperate Socialism. And the Socialism of working-women (as, too, of the majority of working-men) is based on total ignorance of the impracticability and evil of making for universal equality in a vast Scheme of Things, the values and the ultimate successes whereof depend absolutely on preserving those highly-specialised diversities and inequalities, alike of faculty and bent, into which Life, with its countless degrees of evolutionary development, has progressively graded living creatures, brute and human. The innumerable orders and classes of our sociology are as inevitable as they are invaluable. Because they serve for stages of faculty and avocation upon that biological gradient of Ascent by which we climb.

As was pointed out earlier in this book, woman, although passive and reposeful of inherence, is variable and unstable of temperament; her powers being eternally at ebb and flux, in order that she may be the medium of those evolutionary mutations which engender human progress. A nature truly perilous when too great dominance is permitted the sex in affairs so momentous as those of State-administration, upon the firm stability and permanence whereof depend so many destinies. Because this evolutionary impulsiveness of hers is dangerously liable to express itself in irresponsible, chaotic and anarchical outbreaks. As history shows, wreckage of many once mighty, but now extinct, civilisations set in when the males thereof weakly, or basely, surrendered their manhood’s rights of rule to a sex disqualified by its native non-conformability to rule in national and international policies.

Should women ever come to exercise political power identical with man’s, they would be liable to subvert the whole national and international administration of their country on an impulse. Not solely from craving for novelty, but, too, as result of their inherent bent toward forward and precipitate movement, and their implicit faith in change as being necessarily reform.

Nations in which the feminine element is strong betray the native fickleness thereof in perpetual change of Ministry—even in frequent revolution. This element of instability is Ireland’s curse, the flaw in her people’s splendid Celtic faculty.

In view of the stern and strenuous and narrowly-rationalistic creed and claims of Feminism, as too of the steel-brained, steel-willed fighting women leading it, men may scoff, with sense of false security, at odds of danger from feminine weakness and fickleness in Feminist ranks. They scoffed just so at the menace of Prussianism—whereof Feminism is the female rendering.

It must always be remembered, moreover, that the civic and political privileges ceded to Woman, the Feminist, are ceded alike to that freakish, irresponsible creature Woman, the Femininist, who, to counterbalance the decline of woman-quality in those others of her sex, adds to her number and her freakishness as those others wax in number and in stern determination. And in a House of Commons of mixed sex, Feminists would find, to their undoing, that here as elsewhere the Ultra-Feminines would speedily outnumber and out-power themselves. The Movement, inaugurated in all the stern and sterile sex-insensibility of the Feminist code, would soon be dry-rotten and corrupt with the weaknesses bred of Effeminacy.

Nor should it be forgotten that the present Feminist leaders it was who, by their dangerous Bolshevist tactics of Militant Suffragism, proclaimed the anarchy seething in themselves and their adherents.

So long as there survives within the breast of man a spark of that Chivalry which has been both the inspiring and impelling power of his virile development, he can neither meet, nor can he treat with woman upon equal terms.

Always the aspects of her in capacities of mother, wife or love (or mistress) must intervene to disarm, and to incapacitate him from exerting his full strength against her. Whether her appeal to him be sacred or profane, accordingly—that of woman at her best or at her worst—always so long as he is man, her highest and most tender (as her basest) appeal will be by way of those woman-Unfitnesses which in every age have served as highest incentive of his Fitnesses; that he might win, safeguard and cherish her. This chivalrous instinct it was, in part—for behind it lurked the recognition of more than half a nation suffering from the wrong of Unenfranchisement—which disarmed and paralysed his action in respect of those same Suffragist outbreaks. And so long as he is man, will he be similarly disarmed and dangerously inhibited from meeting and from battling successfully with woman.

History repeats itself. And if men suppose that they have seen the last of female Militancy, and overlook the menacing truth that their own incapacity to cope with this must increase inevitably in direct proportion to woman’s waxing power, they are blind, indeed, to dangerous breakers ahead.

Having sown the fickle wind of woman’s variability, they are like to reap the whirlwind in her inherent non-conformability; a difficult and parlous factor such as they have never previously encountered in political and industrial administration. Such non-conformability as is seen at an extreme in the anarchy of revolutions; in which women, having lost control and balance, plunge deeper and deeper into excesses, without power, it would seem, of recoil. While men reach a maximum, recover poise, and then setting about to re-constitute order out of chaos, more often than not evolve a higher form of order than had previously obtained.

VII

Secure in their traditional superior strength, however, and with characteristic complacency in this relation, men have no suspicion of the sex-antagonism—hatred even—seething against them in Feminism. And this far from having been annealed or softened, has been, on the contrary, greatly aggravated by the concessions and new privileges lately accorded the sex.

Strange to say, the chief talk of extremist women in their new War-capacities was bitterest grievance and hostility against the male, because, although installed in masculine positions, they were denied rights identical with his; of rank and recognition, of responsibility and pay. That they held these capacities temporarily merely, and as novices and amateurs, while men held theirs as experts, for long service or for superior values by right of masculine abilities, had no weight whatsoever. Never in all her days of so-called subjection has woman been so loud and denunciatory of the injustices of The Oppressor, of his conspiracies and crimes against her, as since she has been yielded a number of those rights which Feminism claims.

Feminists will say this is because complete equality in all things has not yet been granted—has yet to be fought for. The truth is, however, that the interests and functions of men fail wholly to satisfy the wholly dissimilar natures of women. But until they have realised this—the true reason of their discontent—an ever-increasing number of women will continue to make these their coveted goal, and to chafe with anger and bitterest resentment against the other sex for denying them full measure of things—without intrinsic value for them.

*         *         *         *         *

It needs no saying by me, that, apart from the Feminist extremist faction, the Woman’s Movement includes a number of the sex characterised by the noblest ideals and impulse, as by the finest achievements; their creed and aims being pure of self-seeking or materialist ambitions for themselves or for their kin. And these it is to whom we owe it, that, amid the clamour and the combat of those others, the spirit of true Womanhood, devoted, wise and altruistic, is making itself felt everywhere in modern thought and modern progress. Such women for the most part discredit Feminism, in many cases directly oppose both its doctrine and practice.

VIII

The huge numerical preponderance of women must, of itself, presently swamp all masculine power and initiative in State affairs unless the political functions of the sexes be separated. Thenceforward, Vox populi must be the voice of Woman—man’s having ceased to be heard.

And man’s chiefest menace lies, be it reiterated to the point of tedium, in that momentous fact of the biological investment in woman, of the Racial Trustfund. For this is, at the same time, his sole heritage and that of the nation. And not only does it constitute her the custodian of Human Life and Faculty but it makes her arbitress as well of man’s and of the nation’s destiny.

In yielding his House of Parliament, man has surrendered not only his highest and most characteristic prerogative, but he has yielded the last exclusive stronghold of his manhood. An entrenchment indispensable to his difficult task of holding his own against a sex overwhelmingly superior in number, and chartered, by right of womanhood, with time-honoured baffling privileges which handicap and defeat him at all turns. A sex Nature has armoured with charms, moreover, and with weaknesses for his disarming; by appeal, on the one hand, to his chivalry, on the other, to his senses.

Entrenched in his last stronghold, he stood some chance of exerting his allotted dominance in life’s affairs. All his strongholds invaded, he stands none.

For the rest, it can only be said that men who should reject their own, and elect members of the opposite sex to represent them in Parliament, would by that vote alone of non-confidence in the ability or the good faith of their kind, proclaim the human male a pitiful failure in species; an order without specialisation of brain, of character, or of moral, to give it essential values in Human concerns.

Woman, on the other hand, would stand acclaimed a Super-Being. One not only highly-specialised by God and Nature, as creatrix of the Race, and endowed with gifts to be the Racial nurse and guide and teacher, but, added to these most vital of human capacities, she would stand accredited by man with such superior qualifications also for the administration of the State as to lead him to adjudge her his superior in this capacity likewise. While her still further pre-eminence is now to be emphasised by pitting her on equal terms against the male, in all the Arts and Crafts, the professions and the businesses.

Truly—poor Super-Being that she is to be—burdened and spent by her super-tax of faculties and functions, she will need, indeed, to break into the Racial Trust-Fund, in order to equip herself for these her multifarious exactions. Because not only will it be her affliction to produce the Race and mother it, but she must provide for it too; moreover, must doctor it, play lawyer, parson and accountant to it; paint its pictures, mould its statuary, plan its architecture, build its houses, compose its music, blow its trumpets, beat its drums; and, over and beyond all these, must administer its politics, and serve it presently, no doubt, as Premier, Primate and Chancellor.

While it must be merely a matter of brief time, when, to her other tasks, will be added the manning of its Army, its Navy and Air-Services, and the serving of its guns.

Should Feminist aims be realised—and already they are more than half-won—it will be a case, truly, of Exit Man!

Rejected on all counts, as possessing no intrinsic sex-values, to offset woman’s vital and pre-eminent one of the creation of Life (for his biological part in this is so slight and brief as to be unworthy of note were it not indispensable, and will be insignificant, indeed, when he no longer serves as highly-specialised agent and artificer of the Racial faculty); possessing no distinctive qualities and no obligations of fatherhood, to protect and to provide for offspring, and thereby to offset woman’s vital and important one of nurturing and rearing this; no more than woman’s equal (if that) in the Sciences and Arts, in Politics and Commerce—Truly no alternative will be left him save to retire, abased, into the dim background of the Human Pageant; a self-admitted failure, without place or standing, by virile and exclusive right and power of body, brain and office.

IX

A more inspiring picture presents itself, however.

Of a Manhood, worthy of its racial and national traditions, waking timely to a recognition of its manhood’s powers and duties, and, having emancipated itself from woman’s rule in all beside her natural province, reinstating its supremacy in every virile field and function; and thus re-shouldering bravely its allotted burdens in Labour, Faculty and Administration.

Of a Womanhood re-finding itself also, and finding itself and its natural lot upon a fairer and a nobler plane—the plane of Life, as ever, but illumined now by broader outlook, and instinct with higher understanding.

And these two working for the common good, of our Anglo-Saxon Race, recruited by their sympathetic impulse and reciprocal achievement, having been set, in course of a few generations, upon routes of such a Human Renaissance as should carry it forward to fulfilment of its splendid destiny.

In this New Human Dispensation would be a House of Women to serve as a second—a balancing and an uplifting—wing to the House of Men.

Thus in the national as in the natural life, The Sexes would be most effectively operating and co-operating; travelling each along its own inherent and allotted lines, employing each its own intrinsic powers and fulfilling its intrinsic functions, apart from, but abreast of and in continual touch with the other; inspiring, fortifying, supplementing and complementing the attributes, the trend and the achievements, each of each.

*         *         *         *         *

Said Mazzini, “Man and Woman are the two human Wings that lift the soul toward the Ideal we are destined to attain.” And the value and the effectiveness of these two human, as of other wings, lie in the degree to which, although they work in unison, they move in different areas; apart from and independent, each of the other; balancing and correlating, but, nevertheless, each sustaining its own side of the body, Vital and Social.

Appendix

Further Evidences in Support of the Biological and Mendelian Propositions Advanced in Book I.

I

The Male is the impelling force in Physical Development, or Adaptation to environment

Scientific stock-breeding supplies valuable practical examples of applied Genetics, or the Science of Heredity.

Although artificial, in the sense that the creatures of the Stock-yard are not mated by law of Natural Selection, nor are they bred or reared under normal environmental conditions, the circumstance that breeders are breeding for special characteristics, and mate the parents with a view to the transmission and the accentuation of such, provides important indications regarding hereditary influence and its determinant factors.

Mr. Horace G. Regnart, who has done much to establish Stock-breeding on a scientific basis, kindly furnishes me with the following interesting and suggestive data:

“We Breeders pay more attention to the bull because he can sire fifty calves yearly; while the cow can produce only one. One can afford to pay a thousand guineas for a bull, whereas one cannot afford fifty cows at the same price. And the purchase of a first-class bull is the cheapest way of getting a good herd. The history of practically every great herd is the history of some particular bull. As we say, ‘a bull is half the herd.’ It is equally true to say that every great bull is the son of a great cow. With one highly-prepotent bull we can raise a high-class herd, even if we start with second-rate females; while a bad bull will ruin the best herd in the county. It is for this reason that we ‘put all our money’ on the bull.”

All of which supports my theory that the male is the impelling agency in Adaptation to Environment, or evolutionary development on the plane of physics, and that such progressive development is achieved by way of the male traits being Dominant upon this plane, and manifesting, accordingly, in the physical terms of stature and muscle and force-production.

The male being the determinant agent in the physical characteristics of size and flesh and nervous energy—for which breeders of Live-stock are making—the bull is “half the herd.” “With one highly-prepotent bull,” a high-class herd may be raised, even though inaugurated with second-rate females. Whilst “a bad bull will ruin the best herd in the county.” Akin to which is the circumstance that, in two generations, the improvement which occurs in the offspring of a New Forest pony-mare when mated with a horse, lapses; the descendants reverting to the type of the New Forest pony.

If, however, the male, being the agent of Adaptation, determines progressive development in the direction of such physical traits as further fit species to its material environment, the female it is, that, being the agency of the Evolution of Life (and of the equipment of species in terms of Life, accordingly) supplies offspring with the Vital potential of living cells and vital organs—heart, lungs, digestive and assimilative organs and functions—which, by engendering the multiple functions and vital processes of Life, sustain the existence and the powers of the organism in relation to environment. The female, moreover, provides it with the Vital potential of reproductive organs for the transmission of types ever further evolved and adapted, in terms both of Life and Adaptation.

The male thus broadly sketches out the lines and supplies the initiative of structural development. The female supplements the sketch with the structural potential of living cells, whereby structural development is achieved; as too with the vital potential of organs whereby living organisation is sustained and transmitted.

The great sire, bull or man, generates the great daughter. But since Life is earlier in origin and precedes Development, the great mother it must be who first engenders the great son. Because, as I have already pointed out, Life and Reproductive-Energy must exist in the potential before they can evolve upon the plane of personal development. In other words, function precedes structure. The potential of both function and structure must precede the development of either on the plane of Life.

Woman, accordingly, is Creatrix of the Race, because in her the Race becomes potential. Man is Artificer of the Race, however, because from him the Race receives its powers of concrete development.

For progressive evolutionary advance, therefore, every new generation of females must contribute a new complement of Vital potential, equal in potence to the new complement of Developmental initiative which the new generation of males contribute, and by way of which the female Vital potential is differentiated into further concrete powers. Fruitless for one parent to supply a finer complement than the other is able to render in terms, respectively, of Life or Development. The female potential must be adequate to energise the male powers of differentiation. The male powers must be adequate to differentiate the female potential.

II

The female supplies the Typal and Vital Potentials of Adaptation

To Mr. Regnart, I am indebted for the following further data, which seem further to support my view:

“Ursula Raglan was a Beef-cow that milked heavily. To a Beef-bull, she produced Gainford Champion—a great bull. While to a Dairy-bull, she produced the dam of Priceless Princess—about the best Dairy-cow that ever looked through a halter.”

Here we find the Vital-potential indispensable to the equipment of great offspring, proved great in the mother, by her Female vital-function of lactation. While her respective bull-mates appear as the determinant factors which differentiate this Vital potential in offspring, respectively, into the Beef-traits (stature and muscle, that is) or the Milking-traits (Vital function, that is). The very term “Dairy-bull,” signifying a male with power to transmit to female descendants the purely Female trait of milking, is evidence, in itself, of a female trait, derived by a male from his mother, passing into the potential, and lying dormant, or Recessive, for a generation, in his male organisation, and then emerging again in his daughter.

The great bull is sire of a great cow—because he was son of a great cow. And he is a great bull because he received from his dam a great female Vital-potential, for differentiation into greatness of the male traits that characterise great males. And in his turn, he may sire a cow greater than his mother, because in passing on to his daughter the great female Vital-potential of his mother, he passes on a female potential of greatness to which his own male inherence of greatness has added a further power of Differentiation. This increased Male power of differentiation, descending in the female line, however, manifests in traits of increased Female functioning—the function of milking, that is.

The daughter inherits thus from her father the Female potential of her paternal grandmother, with new power of Male differentiation acquired by its residence during a generation (so to speak) in a male organisation. Which new power, when reawakened to function in a female organism, manifests in a further degree of Femaleness.

Male development having progressed along lines of increasing brain- and nervous power, which the female has ever further inherited, Female development has progressed along lines of such increasing brain-power as has enabled her to transform her native simple and undifferentiated Femaleness into ever further developed and more complex Female traits, or functional and nervous characteristics.

While, on the other hand, since Female evolution has proceeded along lines of increasing Life, or Vital Power, which the male has ever further inherited this increasing Vital power it has been that has served as potential for the evolution of his Maleness in terms of higher brain- and nervous power.

The great cow is mother of a great bull because she was daughter of a great sire. And she was a great cow because she received from her sire a great male complement of developmental power, which imparted to her Recessive, and undifferentiated Femaleness, further power of functioning as female characteristics. And she may mother a son greater even than her sire because the great male Developmental impetus of her father becomes in her a greater Vital potential; which, descending in the male line, engenders further power for the further differentiation of male characteristics.

III

Evolution of Species and evolution of the Individual occur on different planes

The Evolution of Species progresses in every generation by way of each Sex having derived from the other Sex a new and opposite potential to engender, in every alternate generation, the further evolution of its Sex-traits along its own (and contrary) lines.

It may be considered therefore that Type, or Species, evolves to higher inherences by way of progressive divergences of Sex-characteristics. While the Evolution of the individual progresses in every generation in proportion as parents of both sexes had mated, in the previous generation, with such members of the opposite sex as were best fitted to supply, in the gametes contributed to offspring, complements which, by union with their own, so matched and supplemented their own as to have quickened and energised the development of offspring to the fullest and the most efficient issues. In any line, however, a strain of greatness or of other inherence descends in alternating succession, now in the female, now in the male line; receding now into the potential, and then evolving in development. So that while the Individual normally evolves in every generation, the Type evolves only in alternate generations.

The evolution of Type, or Species, is the intrinsic function of the spontaneous Evolution of Life into two orders of Sex. It occurs on a wholly different plane from that of the evolution of the Individual. But by way of his, or her, complement to the biological constitution of offspring, members of both sexes contribute alike to the evolution of Species and to that of the Individual—according as such complement enhances the power of the traits of the opposite Sex to manifest, and further to evolve in offspring.

The intensification in the one sex of its own inherences stimulates a proportional intensification of the opposite inherences in the other Sex, both as regards the evolution of the Type and of the Individual. The phenomenon would seem to be akin to that increase of one electrical potential evoking a proportional increase of the other electrical potential, to complement it. When one sex fails to supply its due potential, or complement, to the other, the evolution both of Type and Individual receives a check.

And because the evolution of Type is achieved by the Germ-plasm derived from a parent of one sex obtaining new increment from being invested in the organisation of offspring of the opposite sex, it is not until the new Typal-inherence of this Germ-plasm is revivified again in the organisation of a member of the Sex from which the plasm was derived, that such new impulse manifests. Hence the phenomenon of characteristics being transmitted from parents to offspring of opposite sex. So that daughters of normal womanly organisation reproduce the Typal characteristics of their fathers’ maternal line; while in sons of normal male organisation those of their mothers’ paternal line emerge.

Hence too, the reversion of offspring of hybrid plants to the types,—pure Dominant and pure Recessive—of their grandparents.

IV

Progressive segregation of Male and Female traits in opposite sides of body ever further intensifies and differentiates their intrinsic qualities

The biological constitution of humans and of the other higher organisms differentiating them into two opposite symmetrical sides, in which, as development rises higher in the scale, the Dominance, or Maleness, in them is ever further and more perfectly segregated from the Recessiveness, or Femaleness, in them, secures the progressive intensification, respectively, of Maleness or of Femaleness in them, by ever further ranging the factors, or traits, of these on opposite sides of the biological equation; and by thus more effectively centralising the powers, according to sex, in one or the other side thereof.

Mendel’s peas, not thus differentiated into two sides, are bi-sexual and self-fertilising. Of the original stock, that order in which Dominant traits are prepotent is differentiating toward a male genus, however. While the Recessives are differentiating toward a female genus. Although regarded as “pure” Dominants and “pure” Recessives, they are nevertheless hybrids in respect of Sex. Being self-fertilising, both Dominants and Recessives are of low power, alike for reproduction and development. Because the Dominance, or Male developmental power, of the Recessives being inhibited by the Recessiveness, or Femaleness, in them, is of low Vigour. While the Recessiveness, or Female vital power in the Dominants being unduly expended by the Dominance, or Maleness, in them, is of low Vitality. The male sex-cells of the self-fertilising Dominants thus fertilise female sex-cells of low vitality. While the female sex-cells of the self-fertilising Recessives are fertilised by male sex-cells of low vigour.

In cross-breeding, the conditions cease not only to be those of self-fertilising, but they cease, moreover, to be those of the close inbreeding of self-fertilisation. In the “hybrids” obtained by crossing the higher-vigoured male sex-cells of the “pure” Dominants with the higher-vitalised female sex-cells of the “pure” Recessives, the Dominants—because Dominance is prepotent for exterior characteristics—submerge the external traits of the Recessives, which are prepotent for vital and internal functioning. Such Dominants are a bi-sexual species in which the male is prepotent. And to be male, means that they have expended, in terms of structural development, a great proportion of the female Vital power inherent in them; thus masking the Recessive female traits in them, as regards exterior characteristics. But since reproductive power inheres in these Recessive traits, these traits are preserved in the sex-cells, equally with the Dominant traits. The plants being not only bi-sexual, but self-fertilising also, the sex-cells must obviously be bi-sexual too; in order to provide the organism with factors both of life and development. Every sex-cell is a hybrid cell, therefore; bearing both Dominant and Recessive traits. But, like their parents, in some, the Dominant, in others, the Recessive traits are prepotent. And the Dominant sex-cells mating with Dominants, the Recessives with Recessives, the original types of so-called “pure” Dominants and “pure” Recessives reappear in the third generation.

V

Self-fertilising organism is a female organism with a male organism differentiated in it

Because the female represents the Life-potential of species and the Vital potential of organisms, a self-fertilising plant or creature must be regarded as a female organism, with a male organism of Adaptation, or Differentiation, developed in it. This male organism energises both its developmental and its functioning power, and fertilises it; although the potential of structure, of growth, of function and of reproduction are engendered in the female organism. The female is the root-stock or parent-stem of all species, therefore.

If Dominance is Maleness, and Recessiveness is Femaleness, and if Dominance energises structural development while Recessiveness engenders reproduction, a Dominant self-fertilising plant is a female plant, with a male plant of superior Dominance differentiated in it. While a Recessive self-fertilising plant is a female plant of superior Recessiveness, with a male plant of inferior Dominance differentiated in it. In crossing stock of superior Dominance with stock of superior Recessiveness, the Dominant prevails over the Recessive in the general structural traits of the resulting “hybrid,” but not in its reproductive inherence. The new hybrids being male in inherence, nothing is added to the female reproductive, or Vital, potential in them. The root-stock transmits to its sex-cells therefore just as its grandmother did—Recessives of her type, and Dominants of the type of the Dominant male engrafted on her, of the male grandfather of this third generation, that is. Hence reversion.

VI

Sterility of offspring of alien species proves evolution of Species and of Individual are independent phenomena

The fact that dog and wolf, when mated, breed fertile species, proves them sprung from the same root-stock. While the hybrid offspring of different species are sterile. Showing such an intrinsic incompatability of the alien complements in the zygote as, while operating as no bar to their immediate union and their development into a complete hybrid individual, nevertheless bars the incorporation of the alien breed in the Vital potential of stock.

Such sterility in the offspring of creatures of different species is weighty evidence that the Evolution of Type, or Species, and the Evolution of the Individual are wholly independent phenomena; occurring upon wholly different planes, and involving wholly different principles and sets of processes. In the mating of alien species, the two sex-cells, although of dissimilar species-inherence, unite nevertheless and develop in the maternal environment into a living entity of mongrel order. But the Germ-plasm contained in the gamete of one species will not germinate in the alien environment of an organism of alien species. No potential, either Vital or of Differentiation, is engendered, therefore, for production of offspring. Hence sterility results. The potential of a living individual is seen thus to belong to a wholly different plane of phenomena from the potential of Stock. Conditions which do not annul the powers of life and of function in the one, quench life and function in the other with the seal of sterility.

VII

Possible explanation of “Sports”

Mr. Regnart says: “We often meet with Sports. Second- and third-rate parents may produce an exceptionally fine individual, but such animals are always failures to breed from. The law of Filial Regression comes into operation. Our aim is to find families that have produced a large number of fine animals—we know then that we are on safe ground.”

In these cases, it would seem that the “fine individual” results from so singularly harmonious and successful a complementing and fructifying of the parental halves in offspring as conduce to develop the best points of both; doubtless, too, to eliminate or to annul weak or faulty factors of either parental strain. Neither of such inferior-grade parents transmitting a fine lineal potential, however, the exceptional fineness of the individual is not inherent in the Germ-plasm he or she transmits to offspring. The fine characteristics of such “Sports” are not transmissible, therefore, to descendants.

Proof again of two planes of Life and Evolution, that of Species and that of the Individual. Moral, too, of the importance of fine selection in mating, since the harmonious mating of second- or third-rate parents may produce finer offspring than are born of ill-assorted matings of two finer breeds of parent.

The case is recorded of a pony about the size of a Shetland pony, which was the offspring of pedigree Shire-parents on both sides, both parents being over 17 hands. The most striking feature about the animal was that there was nothing of the horse-type about him—he was a perfect example of pony.

Shire horses are typical examples of Vigour, or developmental power, expressed in terms of stature, muscle and nervous energy. And for so long as the breeding for these characteristics was supplemented in terms of vital organs and vital functioning, by an equivalent maternal complement of Vital potential, to sustain the constitutional expenditure involved in stature, muscular equipment, and nervous energy, the breed improved in these particulars. Pushed beyond this limit, by introducing into stock further strains of Vigour, or developmental initiative, without simultaneously providing the indispensable equivalents of these in increasing Vital potentials, all at once the balance toppled, and reversion to inferior type resulted.

An excessive proportion of the Vital power of these two Pedigree Shires of great stature and great strength had been expended in the achievement of such great stature and great strength, and in the equipment of digestive and assimilative organs required to sustain these. But little had remained, accordingly, for Reproductive investments. Hence reversion in the de-vitalised stock.

One conceives of the counterpoise in Stock, of Male and Female complements, as being akin to that of the opposite and complementary curves of an arch. So long as equipoise is sustained by the perfect balance of the contrary curves, so long each re-inforces the other to support a heavy superstructure of development. Lopsidedness of either curve leads to collapse.

VIII

Vigour is Male. Vitability is Female

“Vigour,” which breeders regard as a potent factor in heredity, is commonly confounded with Vital Power, or Vitability; although the two would seem to be diametrically opposite in cause, in nature and effect.

An athlete, in so-called “condition,” is in the prime of Vigour; his muscular and nervous powers being at high levels of structure and of functioning. His Vital powers are proportionally at low ebb, however; as is proved by his notable lack of recuperative power in illness. He is bad subject, indeed, in respect of progress and recovery from disease.

Feeble-minded persons possess but little Vigour of brain or of body, yet their Vital power, as shown in healthy organic functioning and vitativeness, is often extraordinary. Vigour is an expression of nervous energy, and is generated by the brain. Vitability is Life-power, and results from vital organs efficient both in structure and in processes. It is engendered in the Reproductive System; which may be regarded as the power-house of Life and vital function.

Vigour is the power of Differentiation, or Individuation, of an organism, structural and functional, physical and mental, in terms of its relation to environment. Vitability is the intensification of the individualism and of the functioning of an organism in terms of Life-power.

Vigour, being katabolic, a male and a Dominant trait, manifests in man (as in plants) as Tallness, or the expenditure of vital energy upon the material plane, in growth and stature; as too in functional initiative and activity, both physical and mental, on the material plane.

Vitability, being anabolic, a female and a Recessive trait, manifests as Dwarfness, or the conservation of vital energy upon the material plane, in respect of growth and stature; as too in weakness, or inhibition of vigour and activity, both physical and mental.

The male trait of Vigour makes men larger, stronger, hardier, and more resistant to disease than women are. The female trait of Vitability makes women healthier, more charged with vital power and temperament, more recuperative from disease, and longer-lived than men. The complementary inherences of Vigour and Vitability, derived respectively from the two parents, and supplementing one another in offspring, endow him or her with fine form and structure, healthy vital organs and efficient function, power of Life and nervous energy.

In the normal male, Vigour dominates Vitability; the maternal potential of Vitability being differentiated in him into its male equivalent. While in the normal female, Vigour recedes within the Female traits of vital power and healthy functioning, endurance and womanly faculty.

The opposite modes of Vigour and Vitality are well shown in disease. In vigorous men, disease may assume the type known as “sthenic”; occasioning such violent re-activity, or rebellion, of the system, and such consequent severity of symptoms as speedily exhaust the resources, and tend to fatal ending. While Vital power, being anabolic and conservative, meets the foe passively, and instead of wasting, economises the forces by moderation of symptoms; bending to the course and processes of sickness, and making thereby for recovery. Because of the lesser vitability of their cells, disease in men tends toward structural, or organic deteriorations. While disease in normal women is more often functional, merely.

In masculine women, disease is prone, as in men, to structural degenerations. Masculine women are very liable to cancer; a liability they transmit as heritage to offspring of both sexes. Hence the increasing masculinity of latter-day women has entailed upon the race an increased liability to cancer and to other structural degeneration. This liability has assumed such grave proportions as to occur in children even, showing in the abnormal growths, “adenoids” now so prevalent as to have become “the normal” of modern childhood.

IX

The living body is a highly-vitalised Vegetative organism with a highly-specialised Cerebro-nervous organism differentiated in it

Professor Cuvier said, “The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole animal; the other systems are there only to serve it.”

Professor Bergson amplifies the statement:

“A higher organism is essentially a sensori-motor system installed on systems of digestion, respiration, circulation, secretion, etc., whose function it is to repair, cleanse and protect it, to create an unvarying, internal environment for it, and above all to produce its potential energy for conversion into locomotive movement.”

In both statements, is recognition of the Dual differentiation of the body into an organism of Life which functions in relation to its own intrinsic being, and an organism of Consciousness which functions in relation to exterior environment. That in death from starvation, the brain and the nerves remain almost unimpaired, while all the other organs and tissues lose weight, their cells undergoing profound degenerative changes, is further indication of two distinct and separate departments of development and processes in every animal existence.

As in its Mendelian phenomena of the Segregation of its Contrasting Traits, and the Dominance and Recessiveness of these in constitution and heredity, so, in its living organisation, the human body is extraordinarily and in a number of ways essentially plant-like. The brain and the nervous system may be regarded, indeed, as a highly-differentiated Cerebro-Nervous organism grafted upon a simpler Vital, and vegetative body, from which, as from a soil, it draws its life and energy: and from which, as age advances, it gradually withdraws the power of further sustaining its existence.

This Cerebro-Nervous graft perishes only because the Vegetative body on which it is installed has come to the end of its power to sustain the life of the Nervous organism picketed upon it.

The close resemblances in structure and in processes between the Cells of vegetable and animal organisms, when taken in conjunction with a number of other biological indications, justify the conclusion that living bodies are actually vegetative organisms to which have been super-added, by progressive evolutionary differentiations, faculties of Motion and of Consciousness.

(Plants are recognised as possessing rudimentary consciousness. While Growth is a mode of Motion.)

The trunk, which contains the respiratory, circulatory, nutritive and reproductive organs represents the Vitative, or Vegetative, system. The brain with its tributary spinal cord and spinal-nervous system represents the Sensori-motor organism. While the limbs are highly-differentiated implements which the Cerebro-Nervous organism has developed in the Vitative organism; to serve it with means of locomotion and of action, for the achievement of intelligent purpose.

The lungs, with their ramifications of tubes and their air-cells, closely resemble the branches and leaves of a tree, which spread into and absorb from the atmosphere the oxygen whereby it lives. While the convoluted intestines are like the roots of a tree, absorbing nurture for it from environment.

The Vegetative organism, being the agency of Life, is female in origin and inherence.

The Cerebro-spinal organism, being the agency of Adaptation, is male in origin and inherence. In both, however, the inherences of the other sex are represented.

The body resembles thus a bi-sexual plant, its root-stock being female and Recessive, with a male Dominant and differentiating organism incorporated in it.

X

Vegetative body has its own brain and nervous system and its (involuntary) muscles

This Vegetative body has its own separate (organic) brain, in the Solar Plexus—or “Abdominal brain”—and its nervous system, in the intricate “Sympathetic” system of nerves; which, in addition to administering the nutrition of the body, is intimately and closely associated, in psychology, with the brain and with the spinal-nervous system of the Psychical organism. Itself subconscious, this organic brain nevertheless contributes vital impulse and colour to Consciousness.

It possesses also its own specialised system of muscles, the “Involuntary muscles”; which are not under control of the conscious brain and will, but operate automatically—by so-called reflex action. The motions they subtend are concerned with vital functions; nutrition, respiration, circulation, assimilation, elimination, reproduction.

The Vitative organism, being vegetative of growth and passive of mode, needs rest and sun and wind and air and water for its nurture and development. With that rising of the sap in the world of vegetation which occurs in spring, kindred processes occur within the human vegetative body. It responds to the re-creative forces of its mother-earth.

With every recurring Spring-tide, youth turns again to thoughts of love, because of this natural renaissance of its vitative resources, for purposes of re-creation—both of Cells and individuals.

Old age is a permanent winter of this plant-body. Summer suns revive but little more than flickerings of its vegetative pulsings. Although the psychical life, intellectual and nervous, may be still vigorous, the sap of the plant-body no longer rises, quick and warm and fructifying, to earth’s perennial call.

This plant-like body with its plant-like fruiting Cells, it is, that when charged with the graces and magnetic potences of health and high nurture, supplies the pleasing personality found not seldom in sinners, while often conspicuously lacking in saints—a seeming anomaly which has gone far to discredit the virtues.

By way of it, human personality resembles a mystical flowering plant that breathes and feels and moves; and a fruiting plant that reproduces. The Cerebro-Nervous system animates and intelligises this beautiful vessel of flesh wherein it subsists.

The vigour of its Vegetative stock, supplementing brain and nervous system by fine structure, fine stature, organic vigour, native faculty, and reproductive power, has given the Anglo-Saxon race its world-wide rule. It is to this that its women have owed their shapely frames, their healthful constitutions and their loveliness; the warm tints of hair and skin, the fresh and flower-like complexions, and the fruit-like form and bloom of cheek for which they once were famed.

Rich personal charm and sweetness of healthful condition which are all too swiftly passing from our modern women, hag-ridden by a strenuousness that is wrecking the flower-body, with its vital joy and warmth, its grace of being and its bliss of sense, its temperamental thrill and colour.

*         *         *         *         *

The doctrine of Evolution is signally incomplete unless we realise it as a sequence of progressive developments, direct and without intermission, from the simplest forms of Elemental Matter to the highest, living orders of Creation—Mineral, Vegetable, Brute and Human being progressive stages in the evolution of Life and of Consciousness; graded by links so subtly and infinitesimally constituted as to belong equally to the kingdom below and to that above them.

The subject appears full of interest and suggestion, showing all the planes of Nature, from mineral to man, linked in an unbroken line by way of this half-vegetable body of flesh, with its roots in earth and its branches in Consciousness. No more than this briefest of mentions can be given here, however.

XI

Mysterious “Internal Secretions”

Biologists tell of Dual planes of operation in the processes of every organ of the body. Because some of these function on the external plane, in visible secretions or in other ways calculable by scientific methods, and they function, too, upon an Inner and occulted, plane; in the form of mysterious “Internal Secretions,” the mode and nature whereof have long baffled and eluded the most intricate scientific appliances and intellections.

What is indicated if not an Inner, and Potential, plane of Life and vital processes—a plane of Involution, or Recession (centripetal)—whereon factors of environment, air, food, water and so forth are transformed by vital involutionary processes, into potentials of living form and function? Which potentials remain latent, or Recessive, in the cells and glands secreting them, and available for transformation by evolutionary processes, into actualities of physical form and function on the Outer (centrifugal) plane of Life—the plane of Evolution.

And Life and health, together with normality of faculty and function, depend upon the perfect balance and co-ordination of these two contrary orders of factors and processes, which, I assume, are engendered, respectively, in the Male and the Female departments of living organisms of both sexes.

All the vital functions—Respiration, Circulation, Digestion, Reproduction—may be classed as Recessive functions, because they are characterised by a Recession, or withdrawal, from the Without to the Within. This is a phenomenon of the Involution of Environment, for transformation thereof into potential Life, and potential Evolutionary output.

Death is a centripetal withdrawal of the soul from the material Without to an Inner zone of Spiritual, or Potential, Being. And in due time, analogy assures us, having assimilated and transformed the resultant of a terrestrial existence into a new potential of Life, Life issues forth again, by the centrifugal impulse of re-Birth, to differentiate itself once more in living form upon the Outer plane. (Re-incarnation is, obviously, the true interpretation of Resurrection of the body, which otherwise is scientifically impossible.)

Winter withdrawal, or Involution, of the sap of Vegetation from the outer plane of functioning to the inner plane of potential Life, whereby it derives such new increment of Vital potential as, with the outgoing of sap again in the renaissance of spring, evolves in increased growth and new foliage, is further example of the principle and processes of Dominance and Recessiveness—of the female Vital impulse and the male Developmental impetus, operating in an eternal tidal rhythm of ebb and flow.

XII

Dual planes of Mentality: Outer and Material, Inner and Occult

As in the Domain of Life and vital processes, so in the Domain of Consciousness and nervous processes, there are two planes of function; an Inner and occulted plane of Mind, or potential Consciousness, and an Outer plane of material Consciousness; representing respectively afferent (or centripetal) and efferent (or outgoing) nervous currents.

Faculty and sense may be regarded as having developed in one direction along lines of the telescope, with increasing capability to horizon the Without; while they have developed simultaneously along lines of the microscope, to reveal an Invisible Within.

The Senses, which adapt man’s Consciousness to environment by the functions of Sight, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, have become, with evolutionary development, so increasingly sensitised in response to The Without as ever further to have set him in rapport with the world exterior. While, at the same time, so have they become sensitised in response to The Within, as ever further to have deepened and quickened his apprehension of an occulted Interior plane. Faculty has acquired thus, simultaneously with its increasing power of focusing the Outer and Objective, an increasing power so to invert its focus as to penetrate ever more deeply into the Inner and Subjective, alike of man’s own constitution and that of environment.

These two contrary, but co-operative, modes of mentality are, respectively, Intellection and Intuition—Male and Female modes of mind.

XIII

Differentiation of the Zygote, or Mated Sex-cell

I have described, throughout, the right side of the human body as the male-side—that in which the Male-traits of Humanity are specialised in the individual; the left as the woman-side, that in which the Woman-traits of Humanity are centred.

But the modes of constitution, as of inheritance, are more complex, of course, than that one parent supplies the potential of one side, the other parent that of the other side.

As regards inheritance, the maternal ovum comprises, I believe, the potential of the whole body, with the exception of the brain, the spinal-cord and the spinal nerves. But because the mother is descended from parents of both sex, and possesses, therefore, both Male and Female elements, the ovum must contain (as must every other cell) both male and female factors. These, it is conceivable, are grouped, by contrary polarities, into two areas, or hemispheres; an upper and a lower. Of these the upper is Male in inherency. It comprises the potentials of shoulders and spinal column which are fulcra of action, and of lungs and heart which are the energising organs of Life. The lower hemisphere of the ovum is Female in inherency. It comprises the potentials of the pelvis, which is the cradle of Maternity, of the reproductive organs, which engender Life and the emotions, and of the digestive and assimilative organs, which engender vital processes.

So too, because the male parent is likewise descended from parents of opposite sex, his contribution to offspring must also contain both male and female factors. But while the mother supplies, in the ovum, the potential of the whole body—face and head, trunk, limbs and vital organs, the father contributes the potential of the brain, the spinal cord and the spinal nerves only, which adapt the organism, by way of form and Consciousness, to environment. The limbs, which adapt it, by way of Motion, to environment, may be regarded as differentiations primarily of the brain and nervous system.

The ovum is spheroidal; the sperm-cell rectilinear (following the rule that the line of Maleness is a straight one; that of Femaleness, a curve). And as in the spheroidal ovum, the factors of the opposite sexes, grouped into two areas, separate it into hemispheres of opposite sex-inherency, so in the rectilinear sperm-cell, we may surmise the factors of the two sexes to be grouped lengthwise, and to separate it thus into a male side and a female side. Such a sperm-cell penetrating the ovum, and developing laterally, further differentiates this into anterior, posterior and lateral areas. The two lateral developments of this potential brain and spinal cord and nerves eventually constitute the right and the left brain-hemispheres, and differentiate the body into right and left sides.

The left brain-hemisphere, with its half of the spinal cord and nerves, is derived from the male side of the sperm-cell; while the right brain-hemisphere, with its half of the spinal cord and spinal nerves, is derived from the female side (by inheritance) of the sperm cell.

Weismann describes the Germ-Plasm as being transmitted in the female line solely, from ovum of mother to that of daughter.

This supports the above view; namely, that the Germ-Plasm proper is inherent in the ovum, in which it exists in potential, or undifferentiated, form, and that it becomes differentiated (in both sexes) into a right and a left-reproductive gland of contrary sex-inherence, by differentiative power of the dual-sexed sperm-cell. The re-polarisation of the fertilised ovum, which is visible beneath the microscope, would seem to represent this differentiative process.

Since the microcosm is as the macrocosm, the Dual constitution must be repeated in every living cell of the body; the cell-plasma representing the vegetative system, the cell-nucleus representing the cerebro-nervous system. Possibly the nucleolus is the Supra- and Subconscious element.

XIV

Inorganic Matter is Dual and Hermaphrodite. Life breaks up this Neuter counterpoise, and progressively unlocks and segregates, and thus reveals and specialises the inherent attributes of Sex

Phenomena of Duality characterise not Living Matter only, but Inorganic Matter too. The elemental atom is never found manifesting singly, but always as two atoms coupled together, in the form of “the molecule”; these mated atoms being of opposite electrical potential.

And since Living Matter has evolved out of Inorganic Matter—what is to be inferred but that the duality of the living cell is the evolution, on the plane of Life, of the duality of the chemical molecule?

Further, that the duality of living forms in terms of sex-characteristics is the evolution, on the plane of Living Faculty, of the duality alike of the living cell and of the chemical molecule; the two sexes representing, respectively, the contrary inherences of all these dualities, specialised and ever further intensifying in the contrary trends of the opposite Sex-traits of Male and Female.

The elemental molecule is seen thus to be hybrid, or hermaphrodite, in constitution, precisely as the living cell and the living body are. While that both living cells and inorganic crystals reproduce, proves factors of Sex differentiated and functioning in them.

The inertia of Matter is due to the hermaphrodite state; its contrary Sex-impulses interlocking and nullifying one another. Life breaks up this neuter state of equipoise, by increasingly segregating the dual-sex-inherences and evolving each along its own intrinsic trend; thereby engendering between their dual factors fructifying interoperations which result in the motions of Growth and other vital processes.

Growth is a phenomenon of Reproduction. Living cells increase their substance by germination of their bi-sexual elements. Attaining maturity, a cell divides into two cells, each of which by way of similar processes develops into a mature cell.

And since for all Change, two (or more) contrary impulses are necessary, and since Reproduction is a function of Sex, what is to be inferred but that Evolution and Growth and all other phenomena of living cells result from oppositions, co-operations and correlations of the contrary impetus and processes of two orders of sex-factors present therein? By way alone of their bi-sexuality, are cells, both animal and vegetable, able to reproduce the cell-offspring required by living organisms for processes of growth, of function and repair.

THE END

Notes

[←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.

[←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.