FOOTNOTE:

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

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."

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:Homozygotesfor Traits, or pure typical men and women—Dominant males and Recessive females, respectively; andHeterozygotesfor 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 naturalwoman, 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 notseldom 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 individuationbeyond the normalcan 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

The mortality-rate of males is higher always than is that of females, because of the greater hardships and dangersof 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 was135 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 soweed out the weakliest males that many of these do not live to become fathers. Moreover, by developing into abnormal dominance themalepotential 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.

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 demandsupon 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 soindirectlyby 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 articlere 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) dowork 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."

"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) dowork 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.

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 morecommon 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 femaleaphis, when its vital potential is stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the male, but breedsfemalesonly. 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.

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 andantipathetic 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 thepinched 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 alreadypassées. 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 beneaththe 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 particularlyshe—since Woman is both medium and Creatrix of living harmony and grace. So is comeliness declining, however, that oneof 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, hairylimbs 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 andpathos of its wise and tranquil resignation—Compare such with the restless, harried, malcontent old age of modern counsels!

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 onlyhumanly repugnant but, in view of the psychological import of every physical function, it is essentially evil.

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 ofInsectivoræby 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 offiner fierce, evolving species sheathe their claws and mute their hates in a co-operative, self-effacing instinct—Reproduction, here in this disintegrating world of Devolution, functions without welding spark, or lighting gleam of parent-altruism. At best, it is as chill, as colourless and meticulously mechanical as the interminable tickings of a world of clockwork. At worst, it is a repulsive rapacity on the part of females to secure perpetuation. And this secured, they straightway sting the craven male to death, or tear him limb from limb and ghoulishly devour him.

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

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

END OF BOOK I

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

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

[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 thoseorganicallyde-sexed by male pursuits, rest will not avail, of course.—Author.

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN DECADENCE

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.

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 showthat 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.

Investigation shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and licence of theirwomen 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 boldnessworthy 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 thenumber 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 oftheir 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 thehetairai, 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 Grecianhetairaicomprised, 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.

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 andconsequent 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 theirill-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 tolive, 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.

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 theminto 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.

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 theyburst 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 partwomen 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!

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