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 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 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 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 anarrestof 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 anorganisation 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 ismodus 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 conditionsof 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, virilityhas 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 thegenusis 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 fromwithout; because the Woman-traitswithinare, 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 outletand 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 thecomplex 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, asourceof 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 tovivifyingas 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, ofVitalEnergy. 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 storedmechanicalenergy becomes transformed into the higher form ofelectricalenergy, 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, areminor childbirths; each entailing a cycle of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerableconstitutional 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 theiranabolicmode 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 thekatabolic, 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 theanabolicmode 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 akatabolicmetabolism.
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 youngpersons 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!"
THE EXTINCTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE
"We may outrun,By violent swiftness, that which we run at,And lose by over-running."Shakespeare.
"We may outrun,By violent swiftness, that which we run at,And lose by over-running."Shakespeare.
"We may outrun,By violent swiftness, that which we run at,And lose by over-running."Shakespeare.
"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 theseaffect 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.)
InThe 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 oneof 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 ofculture 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; ismore 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 resultinevitably. 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, thereproductive 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 takesthreegenerations of culture—of comparative ease and freedom from the strain of industrial labour and living—to evolvethe 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 morenative 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 thestrainingof 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 50per 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 trainedfor 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 abnormalSex-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 musclesdwarfs 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 tostore reservesof vital energy, for expenditure as required. Exhausting sports in youth engender habits ofover-expenditurethereof.
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 ofJack 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—beingbrain-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 asdestroy 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.