CHAPTER I

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FEMINISM AND SEX-EXTINCTION

* * * * *

OLIVE SCHREINER'S GREAT BOOK

WOMAN & LABOUR

_Large Crown 8vo. Cloth._

8s. 6d. net

"The feelings which are behind the various women's movements could not

find clearer or more eloquent expression than they do in this remarkable

book."

_The Daily Mail._

"At last there has come the book which is destined to be the prophecy

and the gospel of the whole awakening."

_The Nation._

T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., LONDON.

* * * * *

FEMINISM AND SEX-EXTINCTION

by

ARABELLA KENEALY L.R.C.P. (DUBLIN)

"_A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can

a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit._"

"_Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them._"

London

T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd.

1 Adelphi Terrace

First published in 1920

All rights reserved

FOREWORD

Feminism, the extremist--and of late years the predominant cult of the

Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.

It makes for such training and development in woman, of male

characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every

department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political,

industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural

aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for

different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her

womanhood; even to her mother-function. It repudiates all privileges for

her. Boldly it demands a fair field only and no favour; equal rights,

political and social, identical education and training, identical

economic opportunities and avocations, an identical morale, personal and

public.

In _Woman and Labour_, Miss Olive Schreiner sums in a line the Feminist

objective: "_We take all labour for our province._" And this is the text

of the Feminist creed; the elimination of sex-differences and the

abolition of sex-distinctions in every department of life and activity.

Feminists anticipate--the militant faction with zest--fierce economic

encounters between the sexes now that, War ended, our men, having fought

their own and woman's battle in the trenches, are returning to reclaim

their places in the world of work. Secure in that possession which is

"nine-tenths of the law," and armed with their new powers of

enfranchisement, it is further anticipated that the usurpers will be

able triumphantly to stem the masculine reflux, and to retain, on all

hands, their new industrial footing.

By showing that, contrary to Feminist doctrine, the division of Labour

into two sexes, so to speak, is as natural and is as indispensable to

Human Progress as is the division of Life into two sexes, the purpose of

this book is to dissuade women from exploiting a world's misfortunes for

their own immediate profit, and to reconcile them, in their profounder

and more vital interests and in those of the Race, to surrender freely

all the essentially masculine employments into which mischance has cast

them.

Human evolution and progress have resulted absolutely from an opposite

trend, in inherence and development, of the two sexes, as regards Life

and characteristics, aptitude and avocation. The progressive

differentiations and specialisations of vital processes and living

forms, whereby human character and faculty have been increasingly

advanced to higher powers, reach their most admirable culmination in the

complex division of Humanity into two genders; each of which is enabled,

by way of such complex specialisation, to promote, to intensify and to

dignify its own allotted order of qualities. To oppose and frustrate

this natural dispensation, whereby Human development is achieved by the

two sexes travelling along diametrically opposite lines of Ascent, is to

nullify all that civilisation has secured, and to transform the impulse

of Progress into one of Decadence.

Nature, marvellously prescient in all her processes, has provided that

the sexes, by being constituted wholly different in body, brain and

bent, do not normally come into rivalry and antagonism in the fulfilment

of their respective life-roles. Their faculties and functions, being

complementary and supplementary (and obviously best applied, therefore,

in different departments of Life and of Labour), men and women are

naturally dependent upon one another in every human relation; a

dispensation which engenders reciprocal trust, affection and

comradeship.

Feminist doctrine and practice menace these most excellent previsions

and provisions of Nature by thrusting personal rivalries, economic

competition and general conflict of interests between the sexes.

Should any reader find in these pages allusions and passages which,

without biological or medical knowledge, may not be wholly clear to him,

let him remember that these are addressed to such as have dipped more

deeply into the subjects dealt with.

The main outlines and implications of the new Hypothesis presented here,

of the origin and evolution of Sex, are all that he requires to grasp,

in order to follow the argument of the book in its relation to Feminist

methods.

ARABELLA KENEALY, L.R.C.P.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

FOREWORD v

BOOK I

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

I. IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM 3

II. INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND

FEMALE SEX-CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONS

ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE 21

III. THE MYSTERY OF SEX AND SEX-TRANSMISSION 35

IV. ONE SIDE OF BODY IS MALE, THE OTHER SIDE IS FEMALE 51

V. MASCULINE MOTHERS PRODUCE EMASCULATE SONS BY

MISAPPROPRIATING THE LIFE-POTENTIAL OF MALE OFFSPRING 73

BOOK II

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN DECADENCE

I. DECLINE AND FALL OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS

DUE TO FEMINISM 95

II. THE EVOLUTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE 109

III. THE EXTINCTION OF SEX IN ADOLESCENCE 126

IV. THE WOMAN BRAIN: ITS POWERS AND DISABILITIES 146

V. MALE AND FEMALE SEX-INSTINCTS AND MORALE

DIAMETRICALLY DIFFERENT 166

VI. FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS

TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN FACULTY 190

VII. FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DESTRUCTIVE

OF WOMANLY ATTRIBUTES, MORALE AND PROGRESS 219

VIII. DANGEROUS SEPARATION OF WOMEN INTO TWO

ORDERS: FEMINISTS AND FEMININISTS 242

IX. THE IMPENDING SUBJECTION OF MAN 264

APPENDIX

FURTHER EVIDENCES IN SUPPORT OF BIOLOGICAL AND

MENDELIAN PROPOSITIONS ADVANCED IN BOOK I 292

BOOK I

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

IMPASSIONED FALLACIES OF FEMINISM

"The sexual love which has its origin in what is external and

accidental may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is

nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting

which has its source in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and

bring up children."--_Spinoza._

I

There is no subject save that of Religion about which so much

impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written as has been spoken and

written round the Woman Question.

For more than half a century--since Mill wrote his famous _Subjection_,

indeed--it has become an increasing vogue to regard Woman as a martyr;

more or less sainted, more or less crushed and effaced beneath the

iron-heeled tyrannies, personal, economic, and political, of the

oppressor, Man. And it has been in the spirit of this conviction and in

fervid endeavours--indignant and chivalrous on the part of the one sex,

and still more indignant and but little less chivalrous on the part of

the other--to liberate unhappy victims from a barbarous oppression, that

most of the impassioned fallacy has been spoken and written, and doughty

deeds done.

At the certain cost, therefore, of being stigmatised as a reactionary

(severely qualified), I propose to unmask some of these which I believe

to be baseless obsessions, and to present a wholly new--and, I hope, a

more veracious and inspiring version of the case between the sexes.

To begin with, I assert boldly that the so-called Subjection of Woman,

very far from having been a cruel injustice merely, on the part of man,

has served, on the contrary, as a blessing and an inestimable benefit

not only to herself but to the Race bound up in her. A blessing often

rough and painful in its methods, during epochs when all other methods

were both rough and painful, attended, too, by wrongs and cruelties;

yet, in the main, operating vastly to her well-being and advancement

and, in hers, to those of the Race.

Looking back upon the hard and bloody routes of Evolution whereby the

human Races have attained to present-day developments, we see our

forbears groping blindly, fighting blindly, advancing blindly;

stumbling, falling, picking up again; making new departures only

hopelessly to lose the road; making new departures, now to find it and

trudge on. In all its painful and laborious phases, a terrible and

sordid climb. Yet, nevertheless, in its great annals of Ascent, a noble

and a wondrous March of Progress.

And whether we are Religionists or Evolutionists--or are sufficiently

broad-minded to be both--the history of Life is seen to have been a

history of deathless effort, never ceasing, never waning; renewed with

every generation; intensified by every further acquisition of new power,

as, with every further recognition of new goals and problems, the

ever-increasing Purpose and the ever-increasing perplexity and

complexity of The Purpose revealed itself at every step. It becomes

increasingly clear, moreover, that Creation, or Creative Evolution (to

employ Professor Bergson's phrase), has been the resultant of a

progressive aggregation of Atomic Matter about some vast immanent

_Idea_, slowly and by infinitesimal degrees materialising in the

objective. Very much as bricks are grouped about the pre-conceived plan

of a house, and could not be assembled in the building of the simplest

tool-hut without predetermination of the site of every brick, and of

the relation of every brick to every other.

And in all those past ages of conflict, bringing Order out of Chaos,

Progress out of Order, and an ever-increasing domination of blind Energy

and Inorganic Matter by Mind and Purpose, the fighting male it has been

who, in his conquest of the Earth as in his conquest of other fighting

males, both brute and human, has borne the greater heat and burden of

the day. Women have striven also--toil has been the crux of their

development as of their mates. But men have striven twofold. While women

toiled in the security of homes, the sword, the blunderbuss or

press-gang, or the equivalent of these, according to the epoch, awaited

men and still await them at most street-corners of the arduous male

career.

Women have suffered more, _psychically_; because this way lay their

nature and their human lot. Men have suffered more, _materially_;

because here lay theirs. And since advancement comes by suffering, women

are reaping to-day the harvest of past travail of their sex, in the

higher psychical development which now characterises that sex. During

centuries when men were vastly too hard-pressed by the struggle for

barest existence to have been aware that they possessed souls, women

were privileged to be aware of theirs--by the affliction thereof.

The immediate purpose of this fencing of the women behind the stronger

frames, the stronger wills, and stronger brains of fighting males was

the Racial one, of course. While men battled with environment and with

alien aggressors for their lives and for their food, as for those of the

family, the sheltered women were alike the loom and cradle of the Race.

As well, they made havens, or homes, for the fighters to return to for

sleep and refreshment. They plied a simple, primitive agriculture,

practised a primitive healing art, and otherwise evolved The

Humanities. But since mortal power is limited, power expended in one

direction is power withdrawn from some other. Power spent in battle is

power lost to progress. The woman who, with the instinct for home and as

shelter for her babes, laid the foundations of Architecture in a hut of

mud, was enabled to do this solely by virtue of masculine protection.

It is in peace only that Progress arises, in leisure that The Arts

evolve. And woman, walled in by the lives of the males, found leisure of

body and mind to pluck flowers for the adorning of her hut, to shape

platters of clay, and, later, even for embellishment of these with crude

designs. Thus she was the first artist.

The fighting male was--by necessity--destructive. He invented a club.

The female was--by privilege--constructive. She invented the needle (a

fish-bone, doubtless). And while the male transmitted to offspring his

virile fighting and destructive qualities, woman tempered and humanised

these by incorporating with them her milder traits and artistries of

peace. Lacking the male aggressive and protective faculties, however,

increasing in skill and resource with his ever further Adaptation to

(and of) environment, woman's gentler and humanising aptitudes would

have had neither opportunity for evolution, nor scope for exercise and

further sway.

II

I have been reading an account, by a naturalist, of some phases in the

life-history of crabs. And it is interesting to find even among

creatures so low in the Life-scale (although Darwin regarded these as

the most intelligent of _crustaceae_) that same instinct of protection of

the female which is seen in the higher orders of creation.

A crab, being encased in an unyielding shell, is able to increase its

growth only by "casting" its shell and developing one of larger size

over its increased bulk. During the interval between casting an old

shell and acquiring a new one, the crab in its soft, pulpy condition is

readily injured, or falls prey to its natural enemies. To protect itself

as well as may be, it shelters in rocky crevices or in other available

hiding-places. This shell-casting occurs in both sexes, of course. But

the circumstances under which the change is made differ widely in the

sexes. For while the male-crab has no protector during his defenceless,

shell-less state, his shell is cast a month or more earlier than occurs

in the female; after which he feeds up, in order to be in superior

fighting trim for her protection during her shell-casting phase.

Fishermen describe him as then spreading himself over her as a hen

covers her chicks, and in her defence desperately attacking all comers.

The result of such protection of the female is that, although males are

larger and fiercer, "hen-crabs" are numerous, while males are scarce.

The like is true of nearly every species. The males protect the females.

Even the gorilla, savage and most terrible of beasts, lies at night on

guard beneath the tree in which his mate and offspring sleep. If need

arise, he fights to the death in their defence.

With regard to the chivalrous devotion of male-birds, Olive Schreiner

thus comments in _Woman and Labour_ (an example of that I have ventured

to describe as the "impassioned fallacy" hurtling round the Woman

Question): "Along the line of bird-life and among certain of its

species, sex has attained its highest aesthetic, and one might almost say

intellectual, development on earth ... represents the realisation of the

highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity."

(This however, less, I fear, to accredit the male-sex with chivalry than

to discredit the human male by ornithological comparison!)

* * * * *

One does not profess that such protective role of males--beast and bird

and crab--is the outcome of sentiment. It is instinctive, subconscious.

Nature's purpose being to preserve and to perpetuate species, she

achieves this by safeguarding the female. The province of the male in

reproduction is but slight and brief. It exacts so little from him as to

interfere not at all with those other masculine activities which are the

function of his sex.

Whereas, as Professor Lester Ward says, "Woman [and the female of all

species] _is_ the Race." Out of her blood and bone and vital powers she

evolves and fashions it, nurtures and ministers to it.

III

For the preservation of species, two roles are essential: the Male role

of Combat, demanding strength and boldness, resource and

fighting-quality, in order to protect and provide for the female and

offspring; and the Female role of Devotion and Self-surrender, in order

to nurture offspring ante-natally, and, after birth, to nurture and to

tend its helplessness.

Now all but biologists, perhaps, take it as matter-of-course that Love

had its origin in Sex.

Seeing love between the sexes as the strongest and most dominant of the

civilised passions, it is natural to infer that it was born of the

instinctive attraction between male and female, and that this

instinctive attraction, with the growth and expansion of faculty, mental

and temperamental, has evolved to the high and tender issues to be found

in latter-day romantic passion; theme of poets, novelists, artists;

richest and most exquisite of life's emotions; inspiration and motive of

the finest human achievements. A passion which, for a space at least,

transfigures the natures and ennobles the lives of all but the crass and

the sordid.

Nevertheless--Love did not arise out of sex. The sex-relation in primal

men and women held no element of affection; no sympathy, tenderness,

self-sacrifice, or other attribute of Love. On the part of the female,

it was compulsory surrender and the habit of surrender to superior

strength, mitigated, doubtless, by a subconscious instinct to secure

offspring. In the male, it was impulse as tyrannous and selfish as was

the instinct to kill. Like the instinct to kill, a factor in it made for

fitness for survival. There was in it, accordingly, an element of

instinctive selection. But the selection made for survival-fitness

merely in the mate. It owed nothing to sentimental appeal exercised by

one female, and lacking in another. The instinct to mate was implanted

by Nature for the continuation of species. If its observance contained

an element of gratification, it held no more of reciprocity than did the

gratification of that stronger lust, to kill, include a consideration of

the feelings of the prey, or than greed of any other form of possession

extends a grace of reciprocal benefit to the thing acquired.

Modern savages have no conception of sexual love. There are no

love-songs, no courtship, no affection in their matings. The males marry

mainly in order to secure wives to work for them. And they select strong

women because these are best fitted for work. Or they select women who

have some or another small possession. Biological instinct is a factor,

doubtless, but it is not a factor of sentiment.

In his fine book, _Natural Law in the Spiritual World_, Professor

Drummond says:

"Probably we have all taken for granted that husbands and wives

have always loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted

... in the lower reaches of Human Nature, husband and wife do not

love one another ... for the vast mass of mankind during the long

ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all

but unknown....

"The idea that the existence of sex accounts for the existence of

love is untrue. Marriage among early races has nothing to do with

love. Among savage peoples, the phenomenon everywhere confronts us

of wedded life without a grain of love. Love then is no necessary

ingredient of the sex-relation; it is not an outgrowth of passion.

Love is love and has always been love, and has never been anything

lower."

Even to-day, despite the evolution of the higher faculties, despite long

centuries of inherited habit and tradition, and despite the circumstance

that in all the nobler types of men and women the sex-instinct is

spiritualised by affection and understanding--Even in this late day of

civilisation, the male sex-instinct may be seen still in all its native

tyranny and selfishness; seeking gratification in sensuality and

cruelty, with callous disregard alike of the welfare as of the suffering

of its victim. In the violation of women and children that occurs both

in peace and in war, the instinct manifests as an impulse of aggression,

and the sex-function as one of brutality or ruthless lust.

IV

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

"In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the

lowest organisms, is as hopeless an inquiry as how life itself

first originated."

And Huxley:

"I know nothing, and never hope to know anything of the steps by

which the passage from molecular movement to states of

consciousness is effected. The two things are on two utterly

different platforms, the physical facts go along by themselves and

the mental facts go along by themselves."

While Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (the biologist who was working out the

theory of Natural Selection simultaneously with Darwin, both unaware

that the other was working in the same direction) attributes to a

Creative act of God, all the moral and intellectual qualities which have

been super-added in man to those lesser and simpler ones he possesses in

common with the higher animals. Wallace describes this as a "Divine

Influx," and regards it as being wholly distinct and apart from the slow

and gradual processes of Natural Selection.

But yet, in point of fact, what was it that inspired and energised the

earlier processes, if not this same Divine Influx? The simpler processes

must, from their earliest rudimentary beginnings, have been leading up

to the later and more complex. And the later and more complex were,

surely, continuous with the simpler--since Nature abhors miracles, and

works by slow progressive biological sequences.

Nothing shows as more impersonal than a crystal; cold, hard, senseless,

motionless. And yet in crystals is the element of Life, even the power

of reproduction, showing factors of sex already operative in them. While

living bodies, charged with warmth, mobility, sentience, intelligence,

have Inorganic Matter for their basis of construction. And that

Inorganic elements are very far from being the impersonal things they

seem, but are linked by subtle correspondences to living Mind and vital

powers, is shown by their effects on living processes and consciousness.

Given as medicines, digestion (which is a species of rapid evolution

from lower to higher forms of energy) develops such vital inherences

within them as prove their apparent impersonality to contain a principle

continuous not only with living processes, but with the highest

mentality.

Professor Leduc observes in his illuminating book, "The Mechanism of

Life," "_the ordinary physical forces have, in fact, a power of

organisation infinitely greater than has been hitherto supposed by the

boldest imagination_."

Coralline structures and beautiful shells, fungi, leaves, and plants

bearing coloured, flowerlike blooms spring into growth when a formless

fragment of calcium salt is dropped into a chemical solution. And these

"Osmotic growths," artificially produced, possess far greater complexity

of structure and of function than do the simpler living organisms of

Nature.

The evidences of a Vast Stupendous Plan, which every further scientific

discovery still further emphasises, are slowly forcing from our men of

Science the confession that behind the marvellous phenomena their

findings reveal, and which they are powerless to explain, must lie a

Cause, occult and irresistible, an Impulse, all-pervading,

incomprehensible.

Bergson describes an _elan vital_--a living impetus--determining such

phenomena.

In his Presidential address to the British Association at Dublin, in

1908, Professor J. S. Haldane summed up as follows the position of

Physiological Science: "The point now reached is that the conceptions of

Physics and Chemistry are insufficient to enable us to understand

physiological phenomena."

Weismann says: "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature, we must admit

a Cause ... inconceivable in its nature, of which we can only say one

thing with certainty, that it must be theological."

Drummond says: "Evolution is Advolution,--better, it is Revelation--the

phenomenal expression of the Divine, the progressive realisation of the

Ideal, the Ascent of Love."

If, then, we admit Life to be the product of a Divine Influx, whereby

Inorganic Matter has been, by way of evolutionary processes,

increasingly empowered to fructify in living form and faculty, Human

Attributes are seen to be the flower of Spiritual seed, which, sown in

Life, has germinated; has struck roots of biological function into

living flesh and put forth leaves in living traits; has developed in

physiological processes and blossomed in powers of Mind and of body. And

as the stronger and deeper the grip of its roots in the earth, the

taller and nobler the oak towers heavenward, so it must be with human

characteristics. The deeper and more firmly the seedling faculties

strike roots in living function, the fuller and more potent springs the

impulse toward that evolutionary perfection which is the goal of Human

Being.

If, however, living processes are the resultant of a Divine Influx, they

are Spiritual processes. Life is then a manifestation in Matter, of

Spirit. All the developments of Life are Spiritual phenomena, therefore.

The imperfection and evil found in living creatures are not attributes

of Life. They are crudities of rudimentary organisation, or are failures

in or aberrations from the normal development of Life.

V

In the Evolution of Faculty, living traits are seen to have been all the

while attaining to higher power by the differentiation and development

of special organs to subserve their fuller function, their finer

conscious apprehension, and their more complex manifestation on the

material plane.

The brain has been specialised thus to serve as the organ of

Consciousness; the eye, of Vision; the ear, of Hearing; the hand, of

Touch and of manipulation. The lowest organisms possess no such

specialised organs of sense or of consciousness. Nor are they equipped

with special reproductive organs. They reproduce by cleavage; by

budding a small portion of themselves, which, when separated, grows to a

mature organism.

With other differentiations and specialisations of Function and Faculty,

there has developed--for the all-important racial purpose of creating

ever higher and more potent living species--the highly-complex human

reproductive system, which, by its close and subtle nervous alliance

with the brain, has become the medium and the instrument of a new and

irresistible emotion. So that it serves not only for the perpetuation of

a complex species, but, moreover, for the attraction, by natural

affinity, of the mates best suited to one another.

And in course of evolutionary progress, the emotion of Love has been all

the while more and more so leavening and inspiring sex-attraction with

its purer and more tender attributes, that human passion has come to

combine--in those of higher nature--the flame and energy of physical

attraction with the tenderness and devotion of altruistic affection.

With the result that human parenthood, thus quickened and spiritualised,

has become ever further empowered to evolve more highly intelligised,

more beautiful and more efficient types of offspring.

That Passion, pure and simple, has evolved out of the Male sex-instinct

is certain. Even in its chivalrous development of romantic passion, are

found, in transfigured form, that flame and urgence for possession which

manifest crudely and cruelly in the primal male-instinct. Without this

virile ardour, indeed, the sex-relation is but a poor and tepid, or a

cold and sensual thing.

Yet Passion is not Love.

That meekness and forbearance, humility and self-surrender have been

reared in the Female sex-instinct of submission to passion (primarily in

aversion and fear more often than in acquiescence) is equally certain.

And without these chastening factors to temper, soften and anneal, the

sex-relation is a fierce and tyrannous concern. But no more than

passion, is submission Love. Neither in passion nor in submission, pure

and simple, is there joy of surrender or welding communion.

Nevertheless, since every human faculty must have its roots in living

function, and every living function must possess some physical organ in

which its processes occur, from what human function sprang the Love that

is selfless, altruistic and pitiful; soul and inspiration of the most

sacred emotions--self-sacrifice, charity, mercy, devotion, tenderness?

In what nursery of Human Consciousness was this fair and gentle blossom

sown; to spring, to develop, and to make for gracious growth?

Since, although it has come to lend its purity and sweetness to the

Sex-passion, it neither sprang from nor has been reared in sex-instinct,

is it a product of Parental Affection? Is it an evolution of the

self-negation and the tenderness of parents for their children?

VI

Throughout Nature, the parental instinct is seen as a unique

development, detached from and high above all other developments.

Demanding, as it does, the complete surrender and self-denying labours

of one individual in the interests of another, it differs from and

traverses all other dictates. It impels a creature whose every instinct

it had been--whose religion of biological survival it had been,

indeed--to be wholly self-centred in its every aim and action, all at

once to make another creature the focus of its interests and efforts.

Where for a scratch, for a glance, the fierce female would have fallen

tooth and nail upon another, now she surrenders meekly to the pangs of

bringing offspring into life--and straightway licks and suckles the

frail being that has riven her. Where she would furiously have driven

off, or would have killed, another creature that approached her food,

now she gives herself as food for this. Where lesser Fitness for

survival on another's part had been signal for making such her prey, now

Unfitness in the extremest degree claims her devotion and care.

Superfluous to cite cases of maternal altruism. The mildest and most

timid among creatures becomes fierce and courageous in defence of her

young. Style it "merely instinct," if you will. It is none the less

heroic on the part of every individual that obeys it, and does not obey

it blindly and mechanically merely, but employs all her poor wit and

resource to suit her heroism to the special circumstance.

Without care and attention from the moment of its birth, the life of an

infant would be reckoned in hours. The higher the organism, the more and

for the longer period its infancy exacts unceasing devotion and nurture.

Fish and moth and other species of low order are cast off in the egg.

Chicks scramble out of the shell.

The higher their grade in the scale of organisation and intelligence,

the more helpless and incapable young creatures are to feed and to fend

for themselves. Kittens are born blind and helpless, but after a few

days they see and crawl about. The elephant-mother suckles and

safeguards her baby-elephant for two whole years.

Now, were there no purpose in all this--Were it not that such devotion

to offspring serves as impulse and spur to the evolution and development

of faculty in parents, Nature, in planning the complex human species,

would, surely, have endowed the human infant and child with fuller

powers of self-preservation.

Were there other functions and aptitudes the exercise whereof would

better stimulate and foster human progress, it is inconceivable that

children would be, and would be for so long, the helpless, feckless,

dependent mortals that they are.

For ten long lunar months, the human babe is part of its mother; homed

in the nest of her body, warmed by her warmth, fed by her blood. She

breathes for it, digests for it, assimilates for it, exercises for it.

For ten further lunar months, it is dependent upon her for the food by

which it lives. For nearly a year, save for an inept power of creeping,

with but small sense of direction, it requires to be moved and carried

everywhere. For years it must be washed, dressed, combed, laid down to

sleep at night, got up in the morning, taken for rides or for walks,

played with, bidden, chidden; comforted, warmed, cooled; defended,

cherished, instructed--in a hundred ways to be gently and progressively

adapted to life, by way of a more or less highly-specialised

environment. Even when no longer helpless, it must be provided for in

the matters of housing, food, clothing, education. It must be instructed

in a means of livelihood, and started on its young career.

Among the poorer classes the child depends upon its hard-worked parents

for a period varying between twelve and sixteen years. In the

professional classes, the young son and daughter are not fully qualified

for independent existence before the ages of twenty-three or

twenty-five. In ill-health, in brain defect, and in other incapacities,

parents must provide for their offspring for life.

And seeing how the demands of the young, and the response and exactions

of the parents multiply and amplify proportionally with the higher

evolution of both, we are forced to believe that the small

survival-value of the child, owing to its native unadaptedness to

environment, is part of The Plan, and that it subserves some high and

complex purpose in human development.

VII

An essential obligation of Parenthood is, that, in order to fulfil this

duly, the parents require to undergo a wholly new and intrinsic

adjustment of faculty. Having arrived already at a complex adaptation to

a complex civilised environment, in physique and character, in mentality

and habit, now, by a revolutionary reversal of their human progress,

they must re-adapt to the simplest of all creatures and conditions--a

helpless, puling infant in a cradle.

Where they had had a whole world, perhaps, of intellectual interests and

social pursuits to engage them, now they forgather beside a cot

and--according as they are human or are not--lose themselves, brain and

heart and soul, in the puling, impotent thing. They make themselves eyes

and ears, arms and legs for it; carriage, chair and bed. They gaze,

entranced, upon the marvel of the opening and shutting of its eyes. It

yawns; they tremble lest it dislocate a jaw. It sneezes; now they

shudder lest it may have taken cold. It gurgles, and they are

transported to a seventh heaven.

Never has either been equally fluttered at their recognition by an

exalted personage as both exult when flattered by the flicker of an

eyelash that it distinguishes its father from its mother; or either from

its nurse. Both perhaps are self-contained and philosophic beings, yet

its cry distracts them; scatters their composure to the winds. The inept

thing cannot even tell them what it wants. Its cry for food is much the

same as is its cry when it requires to be laid down, or lifted up. When

its milk is not sweet enough, its inarticulate fury is expressed in

notes identical--so far as they can judge--with those of its impotent

wrath when a pin-point pricks it.

But whatsoever the cause, to the winds the parental composure is

scattered, as hither and thither they scurry, distraught, seeking a

reason and a remedy. And this, of course, had been their tyrant's

purpose. He had meant to strike panic in his parents' hearts. He was

vexed or empty, or was otherwise uneasy. And behold the penalties of

those who suffer him to be vexed or empty, or otherwise uneasy!

And whether they are rough, hard-working persons who have neither time

nor taste for fuss and nonsense; whether they are the Archbishop of

Canterbury and Mrs. Archbishop, Sir Isaac and Lady Newton, or the

Emperor and Empress of Japan, it is all the same to Baby. No other uses

have they in his absurd judgment than to obey his slightest gurgle.

And the wonder of the business is that they too--provided they be

normal, wholesome-minded, natural-hearted persons--are of similar

opinion. Even a Professor of Archaeology must feel a twinge of some

emotion when his first baby cuts its first tooth. King Lion himself

suffers it with patience when his cub scratches his royal countenance,

or gets its milk-teeth into his prize-bone.

The whole face of the earth is transformed by the Baby, indeed. And how

much it is transformed for the better! It is not too much to say that it

is humanised, redeemed. The most grudging of curmudgeons murmurs only a

little to surrender his place at the fire to The Baby. The thirsty thief

forbears to drink his infant's milk.

In his great story, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, Bret Harte has shown,

and has shown as probable, the uplifting and regenerating influence that

"The Luck"--its mother a sinner, its father, Heaven alone knew

who!--exercised upon a rough community of vicious men.

"It wrastled wi' my finger," says one in an awed whisper. To cover

sentiment he adds, "the durn'd little cuss!" But carefully he segregates

the member sanctified by the tiny, satin touch, from the other fingers

of his wicked hand.

CHAPTER II

INCREASING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE SEX-CHARACTERISTICS AND

FUNCTIONS ARE THE MAIN FEATURE OF HUMAN ADVANCE

"The most beautiful witness to the Evolution of Man is the Mind of

a little child.... It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or

Lucretius, that Maternity, bending over the hollowed cradle in the

forest for a first smile of recognition from her babe, expressed

the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother

since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a

living witness to Ascent."--_Professor Drummond._

I

Tracing the attribute of Love to its source in the parental function, it

becomes clear that this function cannot be dismissed thus in a phrase.

There are two parents. And the parts played by these, respectively, not

only differ widely in their nature, but they are signally

disproportionate in their share of the labours involved. For while the

male bears the brunt of the struggle with environment, for his own and

for survival of his mate and offspring, upon the female falls the

biological stress of pregnancy and lactation, and the material cares of

upbringing.

The reproductive function of the male is but slight and cursory. With

the female lies the tax of havening the embryo before birth, of

nurturing it with her blood and substance, of suffering the drain it

makes upon her vital energy, the burden of its weight; with, finally,

the anguish and the dangers of delivery. And having come through all

this, the subconscious and involuntary sacrifice is replaced by

further--but now voluntary sacrifices. She not only continues to feed it

with her living substance, but she employs brain and wit and bodily

effort in tending, safeguarding and rearing it.

Meanwhile the sire--among the lower creatures, at all events--detaches

himself with lordly indifference from any portion in these later, as he

went free of the earlier obligations. He shares his prey with her and

with their young. He defends them from the natural enemies of all.

Sometimes he condescends to play for minutes with his cubs. But

excepting among birds, the male parent takes little or no part in the

upbringing of his family.

As with Love, so with Fatherhood, we take it as matter-of-course that

this sprang and has evolved to present developments directly out of

natural instinct. But as Love did not evolve out of the sex-instinct,

neither did father-love evolve from a paternal instinct inherent in the

lower animals and in primal man.

Of this, Professor Drummond says:

"The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were

no Fathers, ... while Nature has succeeded in moulding a human

Mother and a human child, he still wanders in the forest, a savage

and unblessed soul.

"This time for him is not lost. In his own way he also is at

school, and learning lessons which will one day be equally needed

by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary to

human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the

cradle; and these robuster elements--strength, courage, manliness,

endurance, self-reliance--could only have been secured away from

domestic cares.... The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a

process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as

formidable a problem to attack.... If Maternity was at a feeble

level in the lower reaches of Nature, Paternity was

non-existent.... When we leave the Birds and pass on to the

Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all backsliders. Many are not only

indifferent to their young, but hostile; and among the Carnivora

the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in case the

father eats them."

In place of saying, therefore, that Love sprang in, and has developed

from the exercise of the parental function, we must say that Love--in

all its higher aspects--sprang and has developed in the _maternal_

function.

But since every attribute, in order to be conscious and realised, is not

only rooted but is reared in living function--out of what living

function did Mother-love evolve? In the exercise of what vital processes

has it been fostered and furthered?

In so far as these involve sacrifice of self in the interests of the

child, the maternal ante-natal processes are processes of

self-surrender. But these, when once incurred, are subconscious and

involuntary. The prospective mother has no choice but to submit to

physiological exactions.

And only a few women--those in whom maternal love is deep beyond the

average--feel affection for their infants before birth.

Since love must have an object upon which to exercise its faculties and

lavish its devotion, it is not, therefore, until the babe is in the

mother's arms that the Love-attribute begins to function. And then the

primal fount of all conscious and voluntary human selflessness and

sacrifice springs afresh in the individual when, in yearning toward the

helpless being in her arms, she wells with tenderness and gives herself

to be its life.

In the altruistic tender yearning of the mother to her babe, whereat her

blood transforms itself to milk, Human Love first sprang and functioned

consciously.

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

is shed for you._

Says Goethe, "There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest

on a deep moral foundation." He might have added "and on a great

biological function." Every act of voluntary sacrifice, every impulse of

compassion, mercy, tenderness, devotion, has had its inspiration and its

source in this which is discredited by some as being a merely physical,

and is despised, accordingly, as being an inferior process; this

mystical transmutation of the mother's blood to milk, and the

self-forgetting yearning wherein she yields herself as food for

offspring. By the evolution, upon ever higher planes of consciousness,

of this primarily instinctive sacrifice, not only Motherhood but

Fatherhood too, and the Love-passion between the sexes have been

fructified and purified, and uplifted down the ages. Other acts of

devotion arise out of maternal ministry. But this is the intrinsic

source of all.

Travelling up through all the rudimentary phases of development,

simultaneously and side by side with the male fierce methods for the

Survival of _Fitness_, there was evolving in the female, subconsciously

and secretly, this sacramental impulse which was to inaugurate a new

era--an era wherein charity and ruth were to be born as response to the

claims of _Unfitness_.

The first woman who, of her free-will, gave her breast to her babe was

the Mother of all the Humanities. She it was who prepared the way for

the coming of Christ. By her, Love entered first into human

consciousness.

And by countless generations of such willing tender sacrifice upon the

part of mothers, human love has climbed out of the darkness of blind

subconscious instinct into the Light of a great transfiguration.

It is weighty evidence of the evolutionary impulse inherent in the

function of Lactation, that the development of this maternal trait

engenders species so far higher in organisation and morale than those of

creatures unequipped to suckle offspring, as to set the Mammalia in a

class by themselves in the van of progressive advance. The higher

organisation and morale of such result not only from the

self-surrendering instinct in the mothers of species, but doubtless also

from the superior nutrition promoted in the developing tissues of the

young of species, by the highly-individualised food elements which are

secreted by the maternal living cells.

The vital significance of this new potence in blood to transform itself

to milk for sustenance of offspring is emphasised by the fact that the

Mammalia are warm-blooded creatures. While that this new quickening of

Life by the altruistic parental instinct originates in the female shows

her as medium of that Divine Influx inspiring Creative Evolution, and

evolving faculty by way of living function.

II

The question now arises: If Love and the higher affections had their

origin in the maternal function, how happens it that man, in whom this

capacity is absent, and who is devoid, moreover, of an inherent paternal

instinct, has come, notwithstanding, to possess these higher affections?

One may answer off-hand, with the lightness of the tyro, that these have

been transmitted to him by maternal inheritance.

But complex biological problems are not thus easily explained. Nature

works by processes, not by implications. And the physical functions and

the mental attributes of the sexes are so dissimilar, and have, with

evolution, so diverged by ever further accentuation, that we must seek

for definite biological processes by way of which the male has become

endowed with, and whereby his primal characteristics have been

transformed by the evolution in him of the maternal instinct--under

guise of the wholly new and alien trait of Fatherhood.

A study of Evolution shows the differentiation and intensification of

Sex-characteristics to have been the main feature in Human advance, and

to have been progressively achieved by incalculable centuries of

increasing differentiation and intensification of two opposite orders of

impulse and faculty.

In savages and in all the less civilised races, the personal and

temperamental differences between the sexes are but slight, and last

for no longer than a few years of life. As with other faculties,

Sex-differentiations become ever further intensified and more

complexly defined as development rises in the scale. Man becomes more

man. Woman, more woman. Most notable during the period over which

the human organisation sustains its maximum of condition, these

Sex-characteristics take longer to arrive at their perfection, and are

longer and more fully sustained in the higher races and organisms than

is the case with the lower. Then, with that degeneration of tissue which

sets in with on-coming age, the old man becomes womanish, the old woman

mannish.

It cannot be doubted that human perfection reaches its climax in the

accentuation of the differences between the Sex-characteristics,

physical and mental, of the one sex from those of the other. The best

types of men differ far more from the best types of women than inferior

men and women differ from one another. In body and in attribute, the

sexes are complementary and supplementary. And their dissimilarities are

the measure of their complementary and supplementary values.

Their attraction to one another, their interest and happiness in one

anothers' company, are proportional to the degree in which members of

one sex supply for members of the other, sentiment and qualities lacking

in their own. Mannish women and womanish men are alike incapable of

experiencing and inspiring the love-passion, which charms and

transfigures life for true man and true woman. These unfortunate,

imperfect neuter-persons, because of the deficiency in them of normal

sex attributes and impulse, are shut out from the richest and sweetest,

most sacred emotions of Humanity--precisely as persons of defective

brain are debarred from the richer and fuller appreciations and joys of

consciousness.

And yet, apart and distinct from, although at the root of this abnormal

neuterdom, wherein the traits of one sex are so antagonised by those of

the other that the finest powers of both are nullified--normally,

all men possess latent in them the qualities of Woman; all women

have latent in them the qualities of Man. Otherwise, this third

Neuter-gender--mannish women and womanish men--could not have come into

being.

In crises of life and under other abnormal conditions, the dormant

characteristics of the one sex are seen to emerge in members of the

other, and to become dominant. A woman, in the face of danger, develops

the strength, the courage and the material resource of a man. A man,

when put to it, reveals the gentleness, patience and psychical resource

of a woman. And in neither is this substitution of alien traits

imitative, merely. That it is vital and intrinsic is shown by the fact

that not only mental characteristics, but the body itself becomes

transformed. If the circumstances--exposure to danger, to hard and rough

physical labours or to mental exactions which are the normal of the

male--continue for long, woman's physique, equally with her attributes,

becomes increasingly virile of mode.

A kindred metamorphosis occurs in men. When called upon to exercise for

any length of time the functions of a woman, beside a sick bed, for

example--or, to state it otherwise, when the male in him no longer

receives the stimulus of the natural male role and activities--man's

virile qualities decline. He becomes emasculate.

So too in disease. With the vital powers at low ebb, man's virility

ebbs low. He grows soft and sensitive, uncontrolled and emotional, loses

energy and initiative; lapses in outlook and temperament from the

masculine normal. In abnormal states of physical development, men are

puerile or womanish.

Women, as result of like abnormal undevelopment, or after operative

removal of reproductive organs (_propter quos est mulier_) become

mannish of type. In extreme cases the figure changes to a strong and

sturdy maleness, the voice drops to gruffness; manners and speech become

terse and abrupt, the jaw squares; even moustache or beard may develop.

Such women lose, perhaps, every womanly characteristic; refinement of

form, mental delicacy and sensitiveness, emotion, subtlety. They lapse

to the biological grade, not of cultured, but of rough working men. In

lesser degrees of sex-extinction, such as are seen in many of our modern

girls, de-sexed by masculine training, the subjects are boyish merely;

lean, active, restless, hipless, breastless, lacking all those fair,

delicate artistries of face and form, as likewise the complex

sensibility and emotionalism which are the higher characteristics of

their sex.

III

These and other singularities of the phenomenon indicate that man has,

so to speak, a woman concealed in him; woman has a man submerged in her.

The case suggests the little Noah and his wife of the toy weatherglass.

Under some conditions the man in woman emerges temporarily. Under some

conditions the woman in man reveals herself. But the emergence in the

one sex of the characteristics of the other, when appreciable and

permanent, is abnormal and unpleasing, and is obviously degenerative.

Man is at his best when the woman in him is dominated by his natural

virile traits. Woman is at her best when the man in her is sheathed

within her native womanliness. This way, each is a highly evolved and a

finely-specialised creation.

Nevertheless, such possession, in latency, of the qualities of the

other, not only enhances for members of both sexes the potence of their

own, inspiring and enriching these, but it engenders more perfect

sympathy and understanding between them. The woman in man endues him

with intuitive apprehension of the Woman-nature; of its needs and modes,

its disabilities, its sufferings and aspirations. The man in woman

informs her of the intrinsic values of his sterner calibre, and thus

lends her patience with his impatiences, moves her tenderness and care

for him in his rougher, more arduous lot, wins her admiration of his

enterprises and ambitions. Moreover, the man in her strengthens and

intelligises her mental fibre, stiffens and renders more stable and

effective her more pliant will and softer, more delicate aptitudes.

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

Masculine intellection, pure and simple, is initiative, vigorous,

enterprising; analytical, logical, critical; its outlook rational and

concrete, its disposition just and honest. Capable in the degree of its

virility, of strenuous and sustained endeavour, of keen concentration

and close application; taking nothing for granted, but questioning and

demanding proof of all things, it is an admirable executive agent of

Mind. _Per se_, however, it is rational and deductive, judicial and

judicious, rather than inspirational and creative. The blending with it

of the Woman-faculty in him quickens his male brain by contributing the

emotional element; endues it with intuitive sensibility, fructifies it

with female creativeness.

Thus it blossoms in Imagination--a new talent, which his natural

intellectual energy and executive ability enable him to raise to highest

issues in Inductive Science and the creative Arts.

Sex, with its phenomena of the characteristics of both sexes blended

but, nevertheless, distinctive in the totally dissimilar constitution of

members of both, presents an enigma which all the thinkers of all the

ages have left unsolved.

What is its significance--what its explanation? How has it been

possible--without miracle, but by way of biological sequences of form

and process, of function and faculty--for the divergent characteristics,

physical and mental, of the two sexes to have developed in both, not

only without either order of characteristics (normally) neutralising

those of the other, but, on the contrary, with both orders ever further

intensifying their differences in the sex to which they belong?

By hereditary transmission. True! But by what precise means? Because

Nature achieves her results always by the continuous operation of

unerring Law and intensifying processes, not by eccentricities or

deviations. When she seems to us to skip at random, it means that we

have missed some intermediate footprints linking her progressive

sequences in a long unbroken train.

This problem of human duality, physical and psychical, has baffled not

biologists only, but philosophers, religionists and seers. It fills both

life and literature with puzzles, paradoxes, incongruities. It has been

the source of perpetual misapprehension, misconception,

maladministration, personal and ethical.

It lies at the root of the whole Woman question. It has supplied the

motive--and has made the mischief of the Feminist propaganda and

practice.

Because, in view of the masculine qualities latent in women, allied with

the circumstance that masculine powers are those most profitable and

effective on the plane alike of physics and of economics, it has seemed

an inevitable conclusion that these dormant male potentialities were

_powers lying idle_; virgin soil which, tilled and cultivated, would

yield fruitful harvest. And this for the benefit not of woman solely,

but of Humanity at large. Strangely enough, the converse proposition has

not presented itself. A pity! For it might have brought enlightenment.

Because it presents itself outright in the form of a patent absurdity.

Suppose a Man's Movement which should have had for aim the cult in males

of their potential woman-qualities! Not for an instant could the project

have found footing as being rational, its ends desirable, or as

improving upon Nature. Everywhere is pity or contempt for the effeminate

man. He is regarded as a poor creature, neither one thing nor the other;

as little the peer of true man as he is notably an unworthy counterfeit

of woman.

Yet how is this? Is it that we admit the male-sex to be so vastly and

intrinsically superior to the female that we are not satisfied for half

only, but demand that the whole human species shall be male?

Nevertheless, since masculine qualities, although undeniably present,

are normally latent in women, they must be inferior in power and calibre

to these same qualities in men. Otherwise, in place of remaining in

latency, they would assert themselves like men. Woman's inferior

masculine powers, even when developed to the full, can equip her,

therefore, to be no more than inferior male; "lesser man" merely, in

place of being "diverse"--the highly-differentiated, finely-specialised

being for which Nature would seem to have been shaping in her, during

untold aeons of progressive differentiation.

IV

The prevailing notion is that these masculine potentialities dormant in

women are powers common to both sexes, which have been blighted in the

one by long generations of educational and vocational disabilities

precluding exercise and outlet for them. Or that they are powers which

have been dwarfed by long "subjection" of the sex in maternal and

domestic functions mainly.

Consulting Biology, we find that such artificial repression of Faculty

in the mother (even were artificially-repressed faculty transmissible as

such) could in no way have limited itself, in succeeding generations, to

inheritance by daughters. On the contrary, the more we learn of the laws

of Heredity, the more it is seen that Faculty descends from mother to

son, rather than from mother to daughter. And yet, despite the

sex-disabilities, personal and social, which are now condemned as having

precluded the mothers of earlier eras from developing their masculine

abilities, such mothers transmitted masculine characteristics in

ever-increasing degree to successive generations of male offspring.

Whereupon another seeming paradox confronts us. Namely, that the sons of

those earlier women, in whom masculine inherences were permitted to

remain dormant, were notably more virile of body and mind than are the

sons of latter-day emancipated mothers who have sedulously cultivated

and have fully exercised their male proclivities.

And now upsprings a further momentous consideration: Is this cause and

effect? Were the sons of women in whom the potential male had remained

abeyant, more virile of body and brain than are the sons of women who

have cultivated masculine characteristics, solely and absolutely because

the mothers in the latter case had misappropriated to their own uses

powers that belonged by right of heredity to sons? While those other

mothers, by retaining such in latency, preserved them as a rich

inheritance for male heirs. Is it similar, indeed, to the cases of a

mother who realises and expends for her own purposes her sons' financial

patrimony, and of a mother who, expending the interest alone thereof,

retains the capital intact; and is enabled thus to pass it on as

heritage? Is the power held latent in one generation the potential of

the generation following?

It may be asked: Why should woman forgo possession and exercise of

faculties available to her, in order to transmit these to sons? One

might answer as in respect of that other patrimony. If it be true that

she holds these powers in trust merely, they are not hers to spend. To

expend them is to despoil her sons; to make paupers and bankrupts of

them, humanly speaking. Further, since daughters inherit from the

father, the male entail woman forbears to realise and to exploit for her

own uses returns to her sex in the person of her grand-daughter--by

paternal inheritance. For the able father is the parent of the able

daughter.

Thus Nature works with the eternal justice of eternal reciprocity

between the sexes; making them all the while more complexly diverse, but

nevertheless more closely interdependent. So that one sex can neither

progress nor can it regress by itself; but draws the other onward with

it, or drags it back. Thus, the bread of human heritage consigned to the

stream of posterity by one sex, for equipment and furtherance of the

other, returns to the hand of the sex that consigned it.

If this be so--and I hope to prove it so--the woman who develops the

potential male in her defrauds of its lawful racial and personal entail

not only the opposite sex, in the person of her son, but she defrauds of

its dower her own sex too, in the person of her grand-daughter.

Of the interesting and important biological processes underlying the

mystery of the Dual-Sex constitution and its manifold phenomena, I am

about to present a wholly new and--I venture to believe--a wholly true

and convincing elucidation.

_Natura simplex est_, said Newton, _et sibi semper consonans_. (Nature

is simple and always agrees with herself.) Bewilderingly multiple in her

phenomena, she is superbly simple in her principles. By the operation of

her one great Law of Gravitation, she sustains the mighty Solar

systems--and brings the apple to the ground. By the extension,

counterpoise and co-operation of one Primal Cosmic Energy--with its dual

impulses, Centripetal and Centrifugal--she has generated all the diverse

marvels of a Universe. And in view of her simplicity of Principle, it is

conceivable that the Duality of Sex may be an extension into Life of

that same principle of Duality which characterises the vaster Cosmic

phenomena.

If this be true, Man and Woman are the complex resultant of infinitely

many and varied evolutionary differentiations and associations of the

two modes of Primal Energy. If so, the principle of Sex must have

existed before Matter; must have been inherent in Creation before

Creation began to evolve. And if so, Evolution would seem to have had

for its purpose the ever further and fuller manifestation of these dual

and contrary inherences in terms of Life and Sex. While, to judge by

effects, it has had for its means such ever more intimate and intricate

co-operations of these as have resulted in the progressively diverse and

complex developments found to-day in Human Life and Human

Sex-Characteristics.

CHAPTER III

THE MYSTERY OF SEX AND SEX-TRANSMISSION

"The idea that the female is naturally and really the superior sex

seems incredible, and only the most liberal and emancipated minds,

possessed of a large store of biological information, are capable

of realising it."--_Professor Lester Ward._

I

Those happy persons who do not perplex themselves concerning the

intrinsic causes behind all physical phenomena see it as only "natural"

that two parents of opposite sex should produce offspring of both sexes.

And yet it is not only a great mystery, but, on the face of it, it is an

anomaly that a child who may possess an admixture of all the physical

and mental characteristics of its two parents, bears, nevertheless, the

sex and the sex-characteristics of one only. Sex, male or female, breeds

true in nearly every case; the rare exceptions merely emphasising the

rule. The mystery deepens when we realise that every individual is a

product of countless such admixtures of the qualities, throughout

countless generations, of countless forefathers and foremothers. And

although such a man or woman may hark back to any one, or more, of the

traits of his or her innumerable forbears, he or she, nevertheless,

"breeds true" in the factors of sex and sex-characteristics.

Long and closely biologists have pondered these many and involved

problems. How is it, they inquire, that an embryo bred of two parents of

opposite sex develops the sex of one only of these? How is it that the

mother, who belongs to one sex only, produces--and produces in about

equal number--offspring of both? The phenomenon is expressed,

biologically, in the term, "sex-limited factor"--an incalculable

something in the embryo which limits its sex to the sex of one only of

its parents. But the "something," and the method of this sex-limitation

have remained enigmas.

Sex is regarded by the new Mendelian school of biologists as that which

is known as a "Mendelian factor." And to follow the argument to its

conclusions, a few simple words about the Mendelian theory of Heredity

are essential to those unacquainted therewith.

* * * * *

About forty years ago, a German monk, Mendel by name, was struck by the

facts that in his bed of edible peas certain plants grew tall, while

others remained dwarf; that the blossoms of certain plants were white

always, while those of others were always coloured. He made a number of

experiments in crossing the plants, with a view to discovering the law

of inheritance by way of its operation in hybrid varieties. Briefly, the

results of his experiments--which have since been repeated and confirmed

by many later observers--were as follows:

There are plants that are tall and can transmit only Tallness to

offspring. There are plants that are dwarf and can transmit only

Dwarfness to offspring. So too, there are plants of white blossom or of

coloured blossom that can transmit, respectively, only White or Coloured

blossoming to offspring.

When a Tall is crossed with a Dwarf plant, however, or a Coloured with a

White plant, strange to say, the hybrid offspring of this cross shows

_one_ only of these opposite traits, to the exclusion of the other. No

intermediate, or mixed, forms are produced.

Thus, a Tall crossed with a Dwarf produces only Talls. Plants of

Coloured flower crossed with those of White flower give only Coloured

flowering varieties. A yellow and a green-seeded cross produce only

yellow-seeded plants.

In the cross between plants of opposite traits, _one_ set of traits

appears thus, exclusively, in the hybrid offspring. These

traits--because they _dominate_ growth and development--Mendel styled

"Dominant." While those traits which are dominated by the other and

opposite traits and do not appear in offspring, he styled "Recessive."

On further breeding, a new and stranger thing happens, however. Because

when such hybrids--plants bred of parents that had borne, respectively,

"Dominant" and "Recessive" characteristics, but with the parental

Dominant traits so overpowering the Recessive traits of the other parent

that these latter are submerged and concealed--When these hybrids are

crossed with other hybrids like themselves, both the Dominant and the

Recessive traits of the original parents reappear in offspring. The tall

hybrids resulting from the cross between Tall and Dwarf plants, when

crossed with other tall hybrids of similar origin, produce both Tall and

Dwarf plants. So with Colour, and with the other so-called "Contrasted

Traits."

It becomes evident, therefore, that although the Dominant traits of

Tallness and Colour overpower in the growth and development of the

second generation of plants, the Recessive traits of Dwarfness and

Whiteness, these latter traits are _submerged_ only, and are neither

impaired in their values, nor destroyed. In the third generation, under

different conditions of mating, the original Recessive, and submerged,

traits re-appear, and reveal themselves in offspring-plants as the

Dwarfness or the Whiteness that had characterised their grandparents.

Mendel assumed that such hybrid plants--offspring of a Dominant and of a

Recessive parent--produce two varieties of sex-cells, or gametes, and

that one order of cells contain the Dominant traits of the Dominant

parent, while the other order contain the Recessive traits of the

Recessive parent.

But any individual sex-cell, or gamete, cannot (according to his view)

bear both Dominant and Recessive traits. The Dominant traits and the

Recessive traits of the respective parents he regarded as being

segregated, absolutely, in one or in the other set of sex-cells produced

by hybrid varieties. And of these, the cells bearing Dominant traits are

able to transmit Dominant traits only to offspring; while the cells

bearing Recessive traits transmit Recessive traits only to offspring.

II

Now, Biology shows that plants and living creatures develop from a

single microscopic cell, formed by the union of two half-cells, of which

each half was contributed by one of the two parents.

Clearly then, a hybrid plant is one that has sprung from the union of

two half-cells, one of which bore the Dominant traits of one parent,

while the other bore the Recessive traits of the other parent. But

because Dominant traits overpower Recessive traits in development, the

cross between a tall plant and a dwarf plant produces tall offspring

only--Tallness being a Dominant trait which overpowers the Recessive

trait of Dwarfness. So too, the cross between a plant bearing coloured

and a plant bearing white flowers produces offspring bearing coloured

flowers only--Colour being Dominant over the Recessive Trait of

Whiteness.

But because the Recessive traits of Dwarfness and of Whiteness were only

_overpowered_ in the plant-development, by the Dominant traits of

Tallness and Colour, but were neither lost nor impaired in stock, hybrid

plants that had shown only Dominant traits in growth and constitution,

produce, nevertheless, two sorts of sex-cells for plant-reproduction:

cells that bear the Recessive traits of the one parent, and cells that

bear the Dominant traits of the other parent. So that in the

fertilisation of one another by such hybrids, cells bearing Dominant

traits mate with other cells bearing Dominant traits, and produce plants

of pure Dominant type--Tall or Coloured, like one of the grandparents.

While cells bearing Recessive traits mate with other cells bearing

Recessive traits, and produce plants of pure Recessive type--Dwarf or

White, like the other grandparent.

It is seen, therefore, that in plants, when a cell bearing Dominant

traits mates with one bearing Recessive traits, the Dominant

characteristics so overpower the Recessive that these latter lie latent,

and concealed, in the resulting plant. But when a cell bearing Recessive

traits mates with another cell bearing Recessive traits, the resulting

plant (its growth and development not over-ridden now by the more

assertive Dominant traits) is able to develop its Recessive

characteristics.

* * * * *

These interesting and significant laws of plant-heredity and

constitution, discovered by Mendel in peas, have since been found by

many expert observers to hold true as regards other species of plants;

as too in poultry, in mice, and in rabbits, and moreover, in the

hereditary transmission of human characteristics.

In _Heredity and Variation_, Dr. Saleeby points out that in the mating

of a black with a white rabbit, some of the offspring will be black like

one parent, some white like the other, and some grey--a blend of the

colours of both parents.

In the last case, the _Dominant_ trait of Blackness, derived from one

rabbit-parent, blends in the fur of the rabbit-offspring with the

_Recessive_ trait of Whiteness, derived from the other rabbit-parent; a

grey rabbit resulting. But that the Contrasted Traits come to no more

than a temporary and partial compromise during the life of such a

rabbit-individual, without either of the traits losing its intrinsic

characteristic--Blackness and Whiteness, respectively--is proved by the

fact that these grey rabbit-offspring, on further breeding, produce not

_grey_ rabbits, but black rabbits and white rabbits; proving that the

Black trait and the White trait in them remained distinct and

segregated, neither altering its character in the least degree.

It is as though one should take a spoonful of black pepper and a

spoonful of white salt, and thoroughly mix them. A drab

"pepper-and-salt" mixture will result. But neither pepper nor salt will

have changed its colour or its properties one iota. Could they be

separated out again, each would be precisely as it had been before

mixing. So it is with the Dominant and the Recessive traits in living

organisms. They commingle intimately, but each retains its original and

intrinsic quality.

All the diverse and beautiful varieties of vegetation and the loveliness

of flowers, in form and colour, result from multiple associations in

hybrid-plants, of those which are known as the "Contrasted Traits" of

parent-stock.

III

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

of Mendelism.

All he requires to remember are its three leading principles. Firstly,

that in the world of Life, plant and animal, living attributes are

divided into two contrasting orders. Secondly, that of these two orders

of so-called "Contrasted Traits" ("Contrasting Traits" would be a fitter

phrase), the two groups are as absolute and opposite in character and in

significance as are the _plus_ and the _minus_ signs of Algebra, the

Positive and the Negative potentials of Electricity, the conditions of

Light and Darkness, of Blackness and Whiteness, of Heat and Cold.

Thirdly, that the Dominant order of traits are paramount over and

extinguish the Recessive order of traits.

To sustain her equilibrium by a counterpoise of dual and contrary

factors, physical and vital, Nature must preserve these factors absolute

and unchangeable as the constitution and the opposite attraction of The

Poles. But in order to produce her countless progressive variations of

form and attribute, physical and vital, she assembles these contrary

factors in countless progressively complex combinations, co-operations

and correlations.

It is conceivable, therefore, that the infinite gradations and

variations of form and attribute found in the world of living creatures

are, as in the world of plants, phenomena of the ever further

differentiation and more complex combination, in the hybrid offspring of

two parents, of two orders of Contrasting Traits, transmitted by the

respective parents.

In all their multiple associations and diverse developments, however,

the two Sets of Traits remain unchanged, precisely as do the individual

elements of chemical combinations. Variations in species result,

accordingly, not from change in the essential traits, but from changes

in the modes and the degrees of the commingling of these in organisms;

and in the modes and degrees of their ever more complex associations in

such.

Tallness, being an impulse toward extension, can never be Dwarfness,

which is an impulse toward contraction. Black can never be White. Square

can never be Round. Yet two opposite traits, both influencing

development, may come to a mean, or poise, in an individual organism; as

is seen in the grey offspring of a black rabbit mated with a white

rabbit. But it is a _counterpoise_ merely of contrary factors. The

traits of Blackness and Whiteness remain absolute and unalterable.

If now, the reader has grasped these leading principles of

Plant-biology, he is in a position to follow the new application of them

to Human Biology which I now venture to present.

Without going into details of physiology, it may be stated that the

principles of reproduction are so identical in plants and living

creatures as wholly to justify argument from one to the other. The only

differences are in degrees of structural complexity as organisms rise

higher in the scale of development, and demand, accordingly, more

complex organs and functions for the more perfect manifestation of their

characteristics; as also for the transmission of these to offspring. It

may be repeated, however, that Mendelian law is found to hold good in

humans, both in the hereditary transmission of normal characteristics

and in the hereditary transmission of the abnormal traits of disease and

degeneracy.

Increasing complexities, structural and functional, are indispensable to

the presentment of the attributes of the higher species, Man. But such

complexities are, nevertheless, continuous with and have sprung out of

the simplicities of lower and rudimentary organisms, precisely as the

branches and leaves and flowers of a plant are continuous with and have

sprung out of its roots. A vital and important biological detail (to be

considered later) is that plants are not, as living creatures are,

differentiated into a right and a left-side, identical in construction.

Another is that plants are self-fertilising.

With the lower animals, plural births are the rule. And in these, the

still crude and imperfect differentiations of the Contrasting Traits

allow of piebald and other modes of chequered colour and amorphous

construction.

The higher the organism, the more complex are the biological

requirements for its pre-natal development, as for its post-natal

nurture. The functions of Parenthood, both physiological and

psychological, are always evolving to higher and more complex issues,

therefore, as the species to be reproduced and nurtured becomes more

complex. In human births, single offspring is the normal. Twin births

are comparatively rare. And that these are abnormal is shown by twins

being below the average always in health or in faculty; usually in both.

IV

As already mentioned, Sex is regarded by the large and ever-increasing

order of the adherents of Mendel as a "Mendelian factor." But in

applying Mendelian truth to humans, I venture to think the applications

have not been carried to their ultimate and most momentous conclusions.

Because, given the keynote to the Principle of Duality in the phenomenon

of the Contrasting Traits found manifesting in plant-heredity and

constitution, the duality of the Human Sexes, with their respective

orders of Contrasting characteristics, suggests itself as being

analogous.

Human attributes, physical and mental, are seen, like those of plants,

to group themselves into two distinct categories, the Male and the

Female sex-characteristics, primary and secondary. And these, though

wholly contrary in nature and in trend, are found--precisely as occurs

in plants--linked together in the hybrid offspring of the two parents

from whom they were, respectively, derived; blending in a temporal

unity, but remaining, nevertheless, unchanged in their essential

differences; coming to means and counterpoises in individual

organisations, yet nevertheless preserved distinct and unalloyed in

these, as is shown by their emergence, unaltered, in offspring of

opposite sexes.

As a hybrid plant is the product of two parents characterised by

opposite traits--Tallness and Dwarfness, for example--so, I submit, a

human creature is the hybrid offspring of two parents characterised by

opposite traits--Maleness and Femaleness, with the Sex-traits

differentiating one sex from the other.

And at once a solution of the many baffling presentments and problems of

Sex presents itself--of the enigma of man with Woman potential in him,

of woman with Man potential in her; a key to the mysterious Duality of

human biology and psychology, with its conflict of battling impulses,

its harmonies of blending attributes, its innumerable and diverse

developments in proportions, in means, in extremes; in normalities,

eccentricities, deviations and reversions. And the analogy between the

two orders of Traits--in Plant-life at the lower end of the scale of

species, and in Human life and psychology at the higher end--suggests

that the ever-increasing complexity of organisation and faculty which

has characterised Evolutionary Progress, has had for aim, as it has had

for method, the ever further differentiation and more perfect

segregation, but, nevertheless, the ever closer and more intricate

association of the contrary factors of Maleness and Femaleness.

In the lower organisms--plant and animal--the two groups of Traits are

but crudely differentiated as characteristics distinguishing one sex

from the other. In such lower organisms, Sex-development is merely

rudimentary; the first foreshadowings in Life of two intrinsic orders of

Essential Attribute, the progressive evolution whereof reveals two

contrary trends in physiological and psychical inherences.

Like Light and Darkness, Heat and Cold, Sex is a phenomenon of Dual

states which manifest by way of relativity. Without Maleness, Femaleness

has no significance--no existence, in fact. And the converse. And in the

lower and rudimentary forms of existence, in proportion to their degrees

of undevelopment, the dual states of Sex are but faintly defined. The

very lowly forms are bi-sexual and self-fertilising. While the first and

simplest mode of reproduction is by cell-division merely; the principle

of Sex, with its dual factors, functioning, but not yet differentiated

into dual forms.

The evolution of Species and the evolution of Sex have been so

absolutely co-incident in biological progress, indeed, that we are

forced to perceive them as cause and effect; or, rather, as one and the

same thing. And the evolution of Sex has meant, of course, the ever

further divergence and the more complex specialisation, in form and in

function, of the characteristics of the one sex from those of the other.

V

On still closer consideration, it appears, moreover, that the evolution

of Sex has meant pre-eminently the evolution of the _female_ sex--the

slow and gradual emergence and development, in species, of female

characteristics, as, in course of Evolution, these have freed themselves

and have risen ever further into evidence from long subjection by the

stronger, fiercer, more assertive--in a word, the Dominant--traits of

the male.

(A conclusion as singularly interesting, I think, as it is instructive,

in view of modern Feminist doctrine and aims, which make, not for the

culture and the ever further evolutionary development of the

Woman-traits in woman, but, on the contrary, for a reversion to earlier

cruder states of the subjection in her of her Woman-traits by those male

Dominant ones, which, as the hybrid offspring of a male and of a female

parent, every female creature inherits from her father, together with

the Woman-traits she inherits from her mother. There is seen here the

irony that woman has, by long ages of biological development, released

herself from sociological subjection by the male, only voluntarily to

set the Woman in herself in far worse psychological subjection to the

male in herself.)

In the new and profoundly interesting light thrown by Mendel on some

previously unsolved problems of heredity, the reason for the long

subjection of woman, biological and sociological, becomes clear.

Because, given the key-notes of Tallness and Colour as Dominant traits,

one identifies these, at once, as traits of Maleness; the greater

stature of male creatures and the richer colour of their fur and plumage

in the lower species pointing unmistakably thereto. Dwarfness (or lesser

stature) and Whiteness (or lesser colour) are Recessive, and are

obviously Female traits. The plant of Dominant type, though still

bi-sexual, is making for a male _genus_; the Recessive type is making

for a Female _genus_. White creatures are so feminine in general effect

that it seems an anomaly when they are males. The converse is true of

black creatures. The black horse is stubborn and restive; the white,

gentle and submissive.

White poultry are prolific in egg-production; white cattle are good

milkers--a female characteristic. Jersey cows are both small in size and

pale of colour.

The male sex stands presumably for Dominance. And his positive, or

objective, traits overpowering the negative, or subjective, traits of

Recessiveness, prevail accordingly in early biological development.

The female sex stands for Recessiveness. Her less assertive traits yield

and recede into the background before those of the Dominant male. In

stature, in strength, and in colour, and in the allied mental

attributes, he holds the foreground in form and in function. The reason

being that his role in Life is adaptation to environment.

The male, therefore, in his masculine role of Adaptation, with his

Dominant traits making fiercely for the survival and for the ever

further development of physical fitness--until physical fitness, or

Adaptation, had attained due degrees of ascendancy--was long lord of

Creation; the female, his vassal. And this not only in life and in

action, but too in the personal characteristics of both sexes. During

aeons before the Recessive female-traits were able to come into evidence

as definite traits, they functioned as negations, merely; submerged and

over-ridden in all female creatures by the Dominant male-traits they had

inherited from their sires.

Primal physical development may be said, thus, to have derived its first

impulse from those fierce and fighting male-proclivities which

characterised it in the epoch of that early savage struggle with

environment whence Species emerged. Only with further evolutionary

progress, do the female traits manifest as personal characteristics,

secure survival, and find increasing exercise and sway.

The tigress is only less fierce, less strong, and less savage than the

tiger. Primal woman was only less fierce, less strong, and less savage

than the male. It is only, indeed, in the maternal function and relation

that the female traits of both tigress and primal woman awake, and find

justification, impulse, and scope for development. And while the

material progress which has led to modern Civilisation resulted from

Adaptation to, and of, environment, and derived its impulse from the

male proclivities of strength, assertiveness and intelligence, the moral

progress thereof may be said to have derived its impulse from the

evolution of the female sex-characteristics. Because the evolution of

Woman-traits has meant the ever further tempering and counterpoising of

the fiercely active and aggressive male propensities, by the more

passive and self-surrendering qualities of the female.

Judging the respective characteristics of the sexes by their

widely-differing roles in the most important of their co-operative

living functions, the parental one--the sole function wherein the sexes

of lower organisation co-operate, indeed--the respective attributes of

Dominance and Recessiveness manifest clearly in these. The province of

the male being to fight for mate and young, providing food, defending

life--in order to fit him for this struggle for racial survival, his

traits of strength and stature remain long paramount, alike in

development and function, over those of the female, as regards his own

organisation and that of his offspring, both male and female. The

province of the female being to surrender her powers to the nurture of

offspring before birth, and, after birth, mildly to suckle and to tend

its helplessness, Nature equips her to these ends; inhibiting, or

negativing, strength and fierceness in her by the traits of

Recessiveness.

Tigress or savage woman, her struggle with the rough conditions of

primal existence is only less fierce and less strenuous than her mate's.

It demands the positive male-qualities (which manifest first in stature,

strength and pugnacity) only less in degree than does his, therefore.

The negative female qualities which, manifesting first in passivity and

surrender, detract from her fierceness and activity, would have made for

extinction of species had they not been defended by those of her

fighting mate, as too by the male-traits she herself had inherited from

her fighting father. They could only evolve, accordingly, precisely in

proportion as they were sheltered behind the male dominant powers. The

tiger shelters his tigress only during her maternal phases, however. Her

cubs brought forth, suckled, reared, and thrust into the jungle to fend

for themselves, she must fight her own battles for food and existence.

And her brief maternal phases being all too short for more than the

scantest development of female traits--which derive their fullest

impulse in their exercise as mother-traits--she remains a tigress

merely, and produces tiger offspring merely, because only tigerishness

secures survival in her domain of life and attribute.

With the further advance of progressing species, savage woman has

evolved from savage brute to savage woman by way of such increasing

shelter and protection by her Dominant mate as have permitted the slow

and gradual evolution of the Recessive Woman-traits in her; and thereby

the evolution of the Woman-sex. Her maternal phases and the unfitnesses

of these become ever more prolonged and incapacitating; her offspring

demands ever longer periods of suckling, devotion and care, as both she

and it rise higher in the scale of organisation. Thus, Sex has evolved

in the male by response to the ever-increasing claims upon him, by the

female and by offspring, of his traits of protective chivalry and

intelligent effort. And Sex has evolved in the female by response to the

ever-increasing claims by offspring upon her, of her traits of devotion

and ministry.

The evolution of the Woman-attributes has been rendered possible only by

that protection accorded by the male to the female as the due of her

maternal unfitnesses; securing thus for her and for offspring a more

privileged and kindlier environment. Environment which, evoking less of

fight and physical stress, enabled her inherent milder,

self-surrendering Recessive traits to emerge, to unfold, and to function

increasingly in life and heredity.

And in the degree of her advancing evolution, the male evolved. Because,

just as in her earlier hybrid constitution, the Dominant male-traits she

had inherited from her father, submerging the Recessive female-traits

she had inherited from her mother, made her, for long aeons, more male

than she was female, so now, with their progressive evolution, the

Recessive female-traits not only made _her_ ever more woman, but,

transmitted in ever fuller measure to her sons, increasingly tempered,

modified and humanised, the masculine fierceness and combativeness of

these. Whereby were substituted arts of peace and civilisation for those

of war.

Thus, with advancing Evolution, the female sex-characteristics have

engendered, in both sexes, qualities of quietism and subordination, to

temper those of force and aggression; amenities of gentleness,

forbearance and affection, to soften assertiveness, turn the edge of

strife, and fructify intelligence. Thus, human civilisation has been

fostered and furthered.

In the hybrid creature that every man and woman is, are grouped two sets

of Contrasting Traits, or Sex-characteristics: traits Dominant, or male,

and traits Recessive, or female. And in the complex human hybrid, these

traits, ever increasing in complexity of constitution and further

diverging in trend, are associated in ever more close and complex poise

and counterpoise as both become more intensified and intelligised.

Man is a hybrid in whom the male Dominant traits derived from his father

prevail in impulse and development over the female Recessive traits

derived from his mother. Woman is a hybrid in whom the maternal

Recessive traits prevail in impulse and development over the male

Dominant traits she has inherited from her father.

The Woman-traits (which, as said, reach their highest culmination in

_mother_-traits), become in man _paternal_ traits; modified

mother-instincts which move him not only to love, in addition to

providing for and protecting offspring, but, transfiguring all his other

characteristics, move him to philanthropy, amity, tolerance and altruism

in his dealings with his fellow-creatures.

CHAPTER IV

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

"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,

Your heart anticipate my heart,

You must be just before, in fine,

See and make me see, for your part,

New depths of the Divine!"

_Robert Browning._

I

On further applying the Principle of Duality, as operating in

organisation and heredity, strangely interesting and significant

developments appear.

Because, with the ever further evolution of Form and Faculty as

organisms have risen higher in the scale of life, the bodies of living

creatures are seen to have become further differentiated into two sides;

a right and a left. Anatomically, these two sides appear identical in

structure and in function, although contrary in incidence to one

another. Each is incomplete and impotent without the other.

Nevertheless, paralysis and other diseases show that each is, as it

were, an entity totally distinct from the other. One side may be wholly

helpless and insensitive while its fellow remains sound and efficient.

Complementary and supplementary each to the other, both are, in a sense,

complete. Further and closer comparison of function shows, however, that

although they co-operate in action, they are by no means identical in

power or aptitude.

The right half of the body is, for both sexes, the active and executive

half; quicker and stronger, and in all ways more efficient on the plane

of physics.

The left half is, relatively, passive and inert, is _responsive_,

mainly, to the initiative and requirements of the right half, by which

its powers are overshadowed in every form of direct activity.

As with the two sides of the body, so it is with the two halves of the

brain, which are at the same time the agencies of mentality and the

centres for recording the sensations and for directing the movements of

the two sides of the body. The brain-half which controls the right side

is known as "the Leading half." It is the agent in concrete

intellection, as in physical activity.

While, so far as biologists and psychologists have been able to

discover, the other half of the brain is negative in function--a blank,

as regards concrete intelligence and nervous or muscular initiative. In

disease, it has sometimes been found to undertake, and to perform feebly

and imperfectly, sundry of the duties of its active "Leading" partner.

But inert and inadequate in muscular action, it is negative in

intellection. It has been observed, however, that patients in whom this

brain-half is diseased show signs of moral deterioration. Yet whatsoever

its functions--and the fact that it does not atrophy nor degenerate in

the marvellous structure and complexity which characterise

brain-constitution shows that it functions duly--its operations are

totally dissimilar to, and are, moreover, wholly overshadowed by those

of its active, intelligent partner.

Here again, as in the two sides of the body, appear, surely, the factors

of Dominance and Recessiveness--in other words of Maleness and

Femaleness; of strength and activity upon material planes, and of

inhibition upon these.

Developments which, being in full agreement with one another and with

others, suggest that the two orders of Sex-characteristics (derived from

parents of opposite sex) are centred, respectively, in the two sides of

the body, and in the two brain-hemispheres allied, respectively, with

these. One side of the body, with its allied brain-half, represents the

paternal inherences of the individual; the other, the maternal. If so,

the right side of the body, with its allied Leading, or Dominant,

brain-half is, clearly, of male inherence. While the left side, with its

allied Recessive, or Dormant, brain-half is of female inherence.

The inference is further supported by the fact that the stronger right

side is rather larger and more masculine in form; while left-side limbs

are in normal right-handed persons, more slender and shapely and

delicate--in a word more womanly--than are those of the right.

As regards the face, from one aspect both sides are complete, from

another aspect both are incomplete, without the other. And in

configuration and expression, the two sides of the face differ

appreciably; the left side being more psychical, emotional and

subtle--in a word again more womanly.

In most persons, the hands and ears and eyes of one side differ from

those of the other, both in form and in function. In some persons the

differences are considerable. It happens occasionally, indeed, that the

eye of one side resembles in colour the eyes of one parent, while the

opposite eye bears the colour of those of the other parent.

Strange to say, there are, moreover, in the human male, organs concerned

with the strictly female function of lactation.

Indication of primaeval human hermaphrodites formed one of Darwin's

greatest puzzles, indeed. In his _Descent of Man_, the following passage

occurs:

"It has been known that in the vertebrate Kingdom one sex bears

rudiments of various accessory parts appertaining to the

reproductive system, which properly belong to the other sex....

Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to

have been hermaphrodite, or androgynous."

It escaped him as it has escaped later biologists that Man, the highest

of the vertebrates, _is still androgynous_. And this inevitably so,

since, being of bi-sexual parentage, the sex-characteristics of both

parents must be present in him.

In _The Evolution of Sex_, Professors Geddes and Thomson state:

"Sometimes a fish is male on one side, female on the other, or male

anteriorly and female posteriorly.... Among invertebrates the same

has been occasionally observed, especially among butterflies, where

striking differences in the colouring of the wings on the two sides

have in some cases been found to correspond to an internal

co-existence of ovary and testes.... The prettiest cases of

superficial hermaphrodism occur among insects, especially among

moths and butterflies, where it often happens that the wings on one

side are those of the male, on the other, those of the female."

II

Despite the fact that Nature has evolved the complex human races from

the single-celled microscopic _amoeba_ ("Protoplasmic father of Man," as

science has styled this), there are those who regard it as another of

numerous blunders on the part of the Great Mother that the left side of

the body is a more or less passive and powerless member. Accordingly,

the doctrine of Ambidextry has arisen. With the result that its wiser

exponents have abandoned it. Because it has been found that children

trained on Ambidextrous lines develop neurotic symptoms. This occurs

even in cases in which children naturally left-handed are taught to use

the right hand, as is normal.

In a lecture given before The Child-Study Society in London, Mr. P. B.

Ballard, London County-Council Inspector of Schools, stated that

left-handed bowlers send down the ugliest balls, left-handed boxers deal

the most unexpected blows--blows that hurt terribly. To be left-handed,

it seemed, was to be not merely awkward, but to be wicked, moreover. Yet

any attempt to interfere with a child's natural habit is liable to make

him stammer. (The evil bent of left-handed persons has a special

significance in view of my hypothesis of the dissimilar mental functions

of the two brain-hemispheres. The term "sinister" expresses this bent.

The inference is that in such transposition of the normal functions of

the brain-halves, the tempering and humanising influence of the

Woman-half is counteracted.)

Of a group of 545 left-handed children, 1 per cent. of pure left-handers

stammered, against 4.3 per cent, of 399, in course of being taught to

use the right hand, Mr. Ballard further stated. In another group of 207,

the figures were 4.2 per cent, and 21.8 per cent. respectively. Six out

of ten left-handed children who had been taught to use the right hand

were practically cured of stammering after having been allowed to use

the left hand exclusively for eighteen months. There are twice as many

left-handed boys as left-handed girls; and stammering is twice as

prevalent among boys.

All of which indicates normal differences in function of the two sides

of the body--differences suggesting that, as I have surmised, each is

the site and the agency of a principle totally unlike that of the other.

III

Upon referring to Biology--on the processes whereof every development,

both physical and psychical, of living creatures rests--this curious

dual constitution of the body, together with the problems of dual

sex-transmission and inherency, become explicable.

And the solutions are at the same time so simple and inevitable as to be

the strongest possible confirmation of my thesis.

As already stated, living organisms, offspring of two parents, derive

half the source of their structure from one parent, half from the other.

All plants and living creatures evolve their organisation from a single

microscopic cell, precisely as Life itself evolved primarily, and has

developed out of the single-celled, microscopic _amoeba_. The

microscopic cell which develops into a living creature is composed thus

of two halves, or "gametes," to employ the scientific term. One half was

contributed by the father: the other, by the mother. The two have united

to form a whole cell. From such a cell (zygote), half male, half female,

the body of every living organism has sprung.

Now, although these two half-cells unite to form a whole cell, exchange

constituents, and appear to lose their identity each in the other, it

is, in the face of the strange dual constitution of the body, difficult

to doubt that each half actually retains its identity and

sex-inherences, and develops along its own lines (albeit in close

correlation with the other), throughout all the marvellous, intricate,

and complex processes of embryological existence, during which the

zygote is evolving into a living creature, capable of separate and

individual life. And the inherences of these two halves are represented,

at birth, in the respective sides of the body; each being, as it were, a

complete and perfect entity, although inseparably knit in one flesh to

its twin. And throughout all the further intricate and complex processes

whereby the creature comes to maturity, lives, reproduces its species,

and dies, each half preserves its individual inherence alike in

constitution and in function. And yet in the mystical unity of their

commingling duality, they are one flesh.

Each of the parental half-cells contained, marvellously, the potential

moiety of a living personality. But either, alone, would have been but

an incomplete and valueless thing, had it not become united with the

complementary half-cell required to complete it structurally, and to

engender and energise its potentialities. Nevertheless, throughout all

the immature and the mature phases of life, from conception to birth,

and from birth onward to death, the opposite sides of the body represent

normally the opposite sex-inherences of their respective parents. They

are, in humans, the Man and the Woman--two in one--that exist in every

living man and woman. They represent contrary principles; they perform

different functions; they engender and energise dissimilar processes.

One is the centre of the Male characteristics, Dominant upon the

material plane; the other, of the Female characteristics, Recessive

thereon.

Normality and health are the mean and balance, in the individual, of the

complementary and supplementary functions and processes of the opposite

sex-inherences of his, or her, body. Precisely as in the social economy

the complementary and supplementary roles of men and women counterpoise

the aptitudes and determine the effectiveness of human life and action.

The left, Female-half of the body, with its allied half-brain,[1] is

inhibitive, and engenders the evolution and the preservation, physical

and mental, of The Type; sustaining health and vital power by way of the

female attributes of rest and conservation.

The right, Male half, with its allied half-brain, is executive, and

energises the development (Adaptation) of The Type in its relation to

Environment, and, disbursing and applying the vital resources, generates

and differentiates potential faculty in terms of living function.

IV

This hypothesis of the dual constitution and of dual functions of the

two-sided body supplies an explanation, equally simple and inevitable,

of the parental transmission of Sex. _Natura simplex est_, said Newton.

And Du Prel, "Nature is much more simple than we have any conception

of."

Because, as Biology shows, not only does each of the two parents

contribute to offspring, but there being both a right and a left

reproductive gland in members of both sexes, the contribution either

parent supplies must have been derived from one or other of these glands

in them. And if the two sides of the body are of different

sex-inherence, it is only logical to conclude that the contribution the

gland of one side makes will be of different sex-inherence from that of

the other.

Since all forms of Energy have two modes, potential (or latent) and

kinetic (or active), on the plane of physics, this must be true, of

course, of Vital Energy.

Life-energy must be present in all living bodies in the forms,

respectively, of _latent_ Vital Energy and _functioning_ Vital

Energy--energy conserved and available for functioning, and energy

expending itself in the living processes of mentality and action.

An individual is able to move his limbs by power of the _potential_

motion stored, or latent, in the muscle-cells of his limbs. Just as a

locomotive-engine is enabled to travel by power of the _potential_

motion stored in the steam generated in its boiler. And as in the

living organism, so in the engine, the mechanism and the processes that

engender in it the _potential motion_ of steam are wholly distinct from

those which convert this potential motion into _actual motion_.

One is able to think, by power of the _potential_ mentality stored, or

latent, in his brain-cells. For not only the vital processes which

sustain the life of the organism, as those too which enable it to

function in terms of living personality and action, but brain-power also

must exist in the dual forms, respectively, of _potential_ Faculty and

_functioning_ Faculty. So too, Reproductive power. In all of these

appear again the modes of Dominance and Recessiveness, of powers

_positive_ and _manifesting_, and of powers _negative_ and _latent_. And

since the female sex is characterised by traits of repose and

conservation, and the male sex by traits of action, the dual modes of

vital, muscular, cerebral and reproductive energy _in potential_, and of

vital, muscular, cerebral and reproductive energy _in course of

generating function_, range themselves inevitably on the two sides of

the living equation as Sex-characteristics differentiating the male

organisation from that of the female. Thus ranged, they characterise the

two sides of the body as representing, respectively, a right, male side

which is the central agency in function, and a left, female side, which

is the reservoir of the _potential_ of function.

If then the female mode of functioning is the Potential, or Recessive, a

mode of latency, it is to be inferred that the male traits every female

creature inherits from her father will, when incorporated in a body of

female prepotence, pass into the potential, or Recessive, mode; and will

thus become inhibited from developing as male-characteristics.

Nevertheless, this male potential will be preserved in that reproductive

gland which represents the paternal inherences in her, and will be

transmitted, as her contribution to male offspring, in the sex-cells

generated by this gland.

While the female inherences every male derives from his mother will, in

the presence of the Dominant male-characteristics he derives from his

father, retain their latent, or Recessive, mode; and will thus not

emerge as female characteristics. The female inherences will be

preserved, however, in that reproductive gland which represents the

maternal inherences in him; and will be transmitted as his contribution

to female offspring.

It will be seen thus that, as in hybrid plants, so in hybrid creatures

of both sexes, cells of two sexes are generated: in the male, cells

Dominant for maleness and cells Recessive for maleness--female that is;

in the female, Recessive cells, prepotent for femaleness, and Dominant,

or male, cells.

And of these, the Dominant male sex-cells contributed by the male

parent, mating with the Dominant, or male, sex-cells contributed by the

female parent, male offspring results. While the Recessive female

sex-cells contributed by the female parent, mating with the Recessive,

or female, sex-cells contributed by the male parent, female offspring

results.

Furthermore, Dominance being paramount in development, it must be from

the Dominant inherence imparted by residence in a male organisation to

the potential, or Recessive, female Germ-Plasm that the latter derives

the new developmental impulse it transmits to sex-cells. While

Recessiveness being Life and Faculty in the potential mode, it must be

from the Recessive inherence engendered in the Dominant male Germ-Plasm,

by residence in a female organisation, that its Dominance, passing into

latency, derives a new potential of further evolutionary impetus.

The differentiation of living creatures into two sexes, therefore, of

bodies into two sides, of brains into two halves, and of Germ-Plasm into

two reproductive glands, would seem to have had for object the ever

further specialisation and segregation in the individual, for purposes

alike of constitutional organisation and of the evolution of Faculty and

Reproduction, of the two Orders of Contrasting Traits, which I have

assumed to be Maleness and Femaleness, respectively.

From this view-point, the female Sex and Sex-traits are Recessive, or

Potential, always, on the material plane, and manifest increasingly

thereon only by way of ever more complex alliances with male-traits;

which, being positive on the concrete plane, equip the female inherences

for function thereon. Femaleness, or Recessiveness, on its side,

however--being Life-Energy in the potential--is all the while

engendering new potence for Dominance to transform into active, or

functioning, power. While although negative, it is equally potent, on

_its_ side of the equation, to alter the values and manifestations of

Dominance. Just as negative electricity inhibits the positive and

destructive forces of positive electricity, although it does not, of

itself, _manifest directly_.

The Dominant traits of Tallness and Strength, for example, are direct

and _positive_ factors in physical development. Dwarfness and Weakness

are indirect and _negative_ factors therein. Nevertheless, degrees of

Dwarfness or of Weakness must proportionally reduce and modify the

tallness of Tallness or the power of Strength.

But that Recessiveness is not a _minus_ sign merely, as algebraically

understood--but is an essential potence on another, and a psychical

plane, is shown by the lesser height of woman rendering itself as a

Grace; her lesser strength appearing in the new virtue of Gentleness.

That the female provides, for fertilisation, only a single sex-cell,

from the reproductive gland of one or other side, while the male

provides multiple and commingled cells from both sides, supports the

view that sex-cells derived from one side are of opposite sex-inherence

to those from the other side. Otherwise, why two reproductive glands?

The author of _The Causation of Sex_ adduces evidence showing not only

that the two glands are of opposite sex-inherence, but, moreover, that

normally they function alternately; so that now a cell of one, now, of

the other sex, is produced. It is likely, however, that function is

seldom so mechanical, but that personal constitution or nurture modifies

its operations.

That the male cells are multiple in number points to such a struggle of

survival-fitness as ever characterises the more strenuous male destiny.

Not, perhaps, the fittest as regards intrinsic superiority, but that

most compatible with the requirements of the Queen-cell is selected for

mate. Should the Queen-cell be of inferior standard, therefore, then (as

happens in life) not the noblest of type, but that most adapted to

environment secures racial survival.

So that here again, evolutionary racial advance may derive its impulse

from the Female factor.

A singular phenomenon, recorded by the biologist, Roerig, and one which

materially supports my argument, is that disease of the ovaries of a

female deer will cause _male_ antlers to develop in her. Proving a male

organism concealed, or held Recessive, in her, by power of her female

sex-organs normally to inhibit the development of her inherited

male-traits. A strange feature of this abnormal occurrence is that

disease of _one_ ovary only causes antlers to develop on _one_ side

only--and this on the side opposite to that of the diseased gland.

On the other hand, castration of male sheep of the Merino breed (only

the males of which are horned) occasions hornlessness.

V

Male traits being paramount on the plane of concrete function, although

they exist (normally) in Recessive form in the female, it is from the

male inherence of her active right side and its allied brain-half that

she derives her concrete powers alike of body and of brain.

It is obvious, therefore, that when abnormally stimulated by undue

exercise, such male-traits may develop into abnormal dominance.

The left arm of woman is essentially the woman-member. In its

half-passive action of supporting her infant for hours together, it is

stronger for this maternal ministration than is the more active and

doughty right arm of the male. Her left hand is more delicate of form,

gentler and more soothing of motion than her right hand is. It is the

hand she caresses with. While for direct, strong action--masculine

action, that is--the paternal right half of her is dominant, as in the

male. And although in our present-day stages of Evolution, the Recessive

Woman-traits have emerged as definite characteristics, emancipating

themselves from subjection by the Dominant male-traits, it must be

remembered that their impulse and their powers are yet but rudimentary.

Woman is still more male than she is female; her methods being more

masculine still than they are womanly. And this in the degree of her

cruder racial stock, or of the harder conditions (natural or artificial)

of the environment in which she finds herself, demanding more of

masculine proclivity in her--of physical activity and mental

assertiveness--than of her intrinsic Woman-qualities of emotion and

ministry.

Civilisation, foreshadowing evolutionary ideals, discountenances, the

fighting female. Nevertheless, the cruder female _fights_ still with her

male right arm, and the more cultured female, with tongue and tactics.

The intrinsic Woman-qualities, whereof Christianity is the gospel, are

yet in their infancy of development; are yet more ideals for which we

are shaping and waiting than they are realised and abiding facts.

Even their own babes are not secure from the instinct of blows inherent

in the male-muscles of their mothers' right arms, when these are

restrained neither by a woman's tenderness nor by a man's chivalry.

Girl-babies, save those of the rarer higher types, beat their mothers

and nurses only rather less frequently and less fiercely than boy-babies

do.

Later in their life-history, that new impulse to the evolution of the

Woman-traits which characterises their development to womanhood,

normally negatives and further tempers in girls the male instincts of

fight and of sport. But many of our modern amazons, brought up like

boys, are more male than are their brothers. The male fighting-instinct

which moved man to invent a club (destructive) has become so tempered by

the increasingly potent Woman-traits in him that, save when angry or at

war, he is content to turn his club into a golf-stick, a cricket bat, or

tennis racquet; his sword into a plough-share. Whereas, on the contrary,

the Woman-traits which moved woman to invent the needle (constructive)

are becoming so over-ridden by the male in her that modern woman,

artificially masculinised, abhors the needle, and is almost as much

dominated as the other sex is by the male instinct for a weapon in the

hand.

The class, Vertebrates, would seem to represent an adaptation to

environment typically Male; earlier than and contrary in trend to that

of the Mammalia, whereof the impulse was obviously Female.

Increasing vertebration was characterised by such a progressive

differentiation of Male from Female traits as progressively segregated

these in opposite sides of the body; with spinal column and spinal cord

for, respectively, physical and nervous central lines of demarcation.

Thus the Male traits were enabled more and more to detach themselves at

will from Female inhibition, and thereby increasingly to specialise and

exercise those powers of force and fierceness and activity by way of

which species became ever more individuated; aggressive, intelligent,

efficient, in terms of _Fitness_ for the struggle for survival.

Until that later evolution of female adaptation to _Unfitness_, in the

sacrificial function of Lactation, inhibiting and tempering the earlier

male trend, engendered the yet higher order of Mammalia.

(With that intuitive illumination inspiring speech, men and races

lacking in virility are contemptuously described as being

"invertebrate.")

According to this hypothesis, the paternal (and male) inherences of any

mother may be said to be transmitted to the grandson in the direct male

line of her heredity--an unbroken line of Maleness reaching back to its

amoebic origin. While the maternal (and female) inherences of any father

are transmitted, in the direct female line, to the grand-daughter--a

similar line of continuity. The Woman-sex and traits of the grandmother

remain thus for a generation dormant, or Recessive, in the father;

"skipping a generation," as the phrase is. Then, in the third

generation, they re-appear in the grand-daughter; by power of a maternal

contribution in which the female inherence is prepotent. While the

male-sex and traits of the grandfather remain dormant, or potential, in

the mother; likewise "skipping a generation." Then they emerge in the

grandson, by power of a male gamete evoking the inherent male in them.

VI

The attributes of the one sex invested thus in the other, although

normally submerged, form nevertheless a valuable endowment; supplying

supplementary and complementary factors to counterpoise, to energise,

and fructify the powers proper to the sex of the individual.

Man bears throughout life the Woman-potential his mother transmitted to

him. But it is not his to realise. He bears it in trust for his

daughters. He transmits it to his daughters, and in them this potential,

recovering its woman-impulse, evolves to a further degree of

woman-power. The like with mothers and sons.

All of which is supported by the Mendelian doctrine that the mother

transmits "Femaleness" as a Dominant factor to her daughters and as a

Recessive factor to her sons.

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

Professor Punnett says with regard to the phenomenon:

"The mother transmits to her daughter the dominant faculty of

femaleness, but to balance this, as it were, she transmits to her

sons another quality which her daughters do not receive ... among

human families, in respect to particular qualities, the sons tend

to resemble their mothers more than their daughters do."

A striking illustration of such transmission by mother to son of a

paternally-derived abnormal inherence _which she herself does not

develop_, is found in so-called "bleeders"; persons who suffer from the

disease, haemophilia. The daughters of a "bleeder" father show no symptom

at all of the affliction, but they, nevertheless, pass on to their sons

this male heritage of the grandfather.

There are numerous other examples of traits and diseases thus "skipping

a generation"--in other words, of lying dormant, or potential, merely;

overshadowed in the constitution and psychology of the sex to which they

do not rightly belong, but developing in a succeeding generation in

offspring of that sex whereof they are a natural trait, or (so to speak)

a natural defect.

Since the woman-half she contributes to their hybrid constitution

engenders the potential of their living processes, the mother may be

regarded as still mothering her children throughout development and

maturity, and to the end of their natural term. Accounting for that

mystical sympathy between mother and child which intuitively informs her

of fatalities occurring to absent sons and daughters--but to sons

pre-eminently. Marvellously, they remain one living flesh so long as

life persists.

During the War, mothers at a distance have known by an intuitive flash,

and have told of the death of sons cut down in battle. One mother

described the sensation she experienced as being precisely _as though

one side of her body had been suddenly torn away_. So too, mothers whose

infants have died during childbirth or shortly after, describe as

persisting for months subsequently a sense as though part of them were

dead.

The father too must function in the hybrid living constitution. With the

immense difference, however, that his part therein is a factor of the

development of traits, not of the mystical functioning of Life. A

notable feature of this paternal heritage is that in women at middle-age

(when the wane of reproductive power releases vital potential from

maternal investments) not only may masculine physical traits emerge, but

there may develop in them notable brain-capacities inherited from the

father. Capacities inherent in them previously, but long inhibited in

action by the normal female brain-Recessiveness.

VII

Every higher evolutionary differentiation results inevitably not only in

progressive mutations in the traits of species, but, as well, in

variations of the reproductive processes of such. When _defects_,

physical or mental, are not reproduced in later generations true to

Mendelian law, however, this is not abnormal, but is beautifully normal.

Normality requires that defect--which is a deviation from The

Normal--shall not be transmitted in any ratio whatsoever, but shall be

corrected in a succeeding generation.

Moreover, when we realise the number and the complexities of human

traits, all struggling to keep The Law, it is only to be expected that

any single characteristic owing to its sex-inherence, may pass into the

potential or Recessive, mode, and may thus vanish for a generation.

Further, by the law of compensation, any trait or determinant, although

itself Dominant, may be dwarfed and submerged by some other Dominant

trait more assertive than itself.

Suppose a father normally larger and stronger than the normally shorter

and weaker mother: Stature and strength being both Dominant and

masculine traits, the traits of such a father, dominating the

development of his sons, should so over-ride the traits of lesser

strength and stature of the mother (in whom strength and stature are

normally Recessive) that his sons will be tall and broad and strong, and

mentally virile. On the other hand, the mother's traits, prepotent in

the development of daughters, will inhibit in these and diminish the

strength and stature of their paternal inherences. Thus, the woman of

pure Recessive (the essential woman) type is smaller, more delicately

organised, and weaker than the male.

By such means, the normal of the relative strength, stature, and mental

qualifications of the sexes is preserved; the specialised

characteristics of both ever further diverging in trend, while at the

same time intensifying their intrinsic attributes.

Suppose, however, a mother who deviates from the normal in having

developed along masculine lines, and who is, accordingly, tall or strong

or mentally virile: Far from supplementing, in her sons, the father's

traits of strength and stature, her sons will be more or less emasculate

in mind or body, or in both. Strength and stature and virile mentality

not being normal to her, these can only have emerged in her and can only

have been exercised by her at cost of the masculine potential she bore

in trust for male offspring. A woman who wins golf or hockey-matches may

be said therefore to energise her muscles with the potential manhood of

possible sons. With their potential existence indeed, since

over-strenuous pursuits may sterilise women absolutely as regards male

offspring.

Thus it is that muscular and otherwise masculine women produce weakling

males. (Giant women--female-Dominants--are incapable of reproduction.)

Tall mothers may produce tall sons, by transmitting to them the single

trait of tallness of the maternal grandfather. But since tallness in

woman is development along masculine lines, and detracts from her

maternal power, the tall son in such case is likely to be defective in

other manly traits. Men are of greater height than women, mainly in

consequence of greater length of leg. The power expended in the male in

length of limb is absorbed in the female into complex pelvic

developments, wherein it is stored as Reproductive potential.

The power thus stored in latency reveals itself in the amazing

evolution, as regards capacity and muscular equipment, by way of which

the maternal _uterus_ so develops during pregnancy as to enable it to

cradle an infant of 9 or 10 lbs. weight, and to deliver this by output

of immense energy--a marvel of biological function and mechanism.

Since the male trait of Tallness may be transmitted by woman from her

father to her son, without manifesting in herself, it is obviously waste

of power for her to develop a characteristic she needs neither for

personal nor for hereditary purposes. Whereas, by further evolving her

own woman-traits of suppleness and grace, she contributes new factors to

those of the male. And so with all the other sex-characteristics.

Mr. Horace G. Regnart, M.A., the well-known breeder of pedigree stock,

states that a bull of marked _masculine_ characteristics sires daughters

of marked _feminine_ characteristics. While the _feminine_ cow bears

sons of strongly _masculine_ type. On the other hand, the daughters of a

"steery" bull (a bull of de-sexed type) are themselves defective in

female characteristics, and bear sons defective in male characteristics.

VIII

Clearly and fully defined, accordingly, as Sex-characteristics are in

proportion as the individual is of high and normal organisation,

obtrusions in the one sex of the traits of the other are as much

stigmata of abnormality as are cleft-palate, webbed feet, or other

deviations from the normal. Because they are reversions to lower types

of organisation in which sex was less highly differentiated than is the

normal of to-day.

Although, with progressive evolution, the Sex-traits are spun ever finer

and finer, and are ever more subtly and inextricably interwoven with

those of the other, normally the threads run true and distinct as do the

threads of warp and woof in textile fabric.

The ever finer spinning of the threads secures an ever closer, subtler

interweaving. Whereby the fabric of human organisation, of character and

Faculty, becomes ever firmer yet more supple, ever stronger yet more

delicate, ever more intense and rich of colour, but nevertheless more

beautifully harmonised and subtilised by half-tones and complex

gradations.

This is the reason why the strongest and most virile men are the most

humane; the sternest are most tender; the greatest are most subtle. So

inextricably interwoven with their virile characteristics are the finer

spun Woman-potencies, as strangely and exquisitely to temper and

sensitise their Manhood's powers.

And it is why the tenderest, most womanly women are the noblest; the

gentlest are the most enduring; the wisest are the sweetest.

But no more than Black can be White, Acid, Alkaline, or the Straight

line a Circle, can Repose be Action, Sternness be Sweetness, Firmness be

Softness, Fierceness be Gentleness; Assertiveness, Selflessness;

Boldness, Modesty. Nevertheless, in the hybrid unfoldment of Contrasting

traits, Softness tempering Fierceness transforms it to Strength;

Sweetness tempering Sternness melts it to Mercy; Assertiveness

reinforcing Selflessness nerves it to Devotion; Firmness preserves

Softness from lapsing to Weakness; Altruism, inspiring Chivalry,

transfigures it to Heroism. But that Fierceness and Strength, Sweetness

and Selflessness, have only intensified as, with further evolution, they

have extended further into Life and Consciousness, is shown when they

tear themselves asunder from their counterpoising attributes. Fierceness

is seen then to be more fierce in complex man--because fierce in so many

more and deeper issues of Life and Consciousness--than is the fierceness

of the gorilla, which manifests largely in muscular savagery; champing

of jaws, and beating on its breast as on a drum.

So too, the emotion of complex woman is more deeply rooted in her, and

is more intense, than is the instinctive emotionalism of the savage

woman which expresses itself mainly in reflex movements and hysterical

outcries.

* * * * *

Thus down the ages, man, by way of Fatherhood, has endowed woman ever

further with his developing traits of strength and intelligence. Woman,

by way of Motherhood, has endowed man with an ever fuller heritage of

her attributes of selflessness and intuition.

So these poor souls--the Man and the Woman in all men and women--have

climbed the steep ascent together, hand in hand, toward the Light.

Without the other, neither could have come. So tragically drear and

solitary would have been the pilgrimage, save for the spiritual converse

of that mystical comrade.

Only by way of this psychical comradeship, which solaces the one sex by

the inspiration of the other, do men and women win through the

terrestrial travail of the human destiny.

The mystical Man (who is her father in her) when woman would falter and

fail in the fight, whispers, "Courage, dear Girl, go on!"

The mystical Woman (who is his mother in him) goes with her son into the

murk and struggle of temptation, holding her lamp of The Good and The

True and The Beautiful before his blinding eyes.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Owing to an interchange of nervous strands, the right half of the

brain controls the left half of the body; and the converse. Structural

details which need not be considered here, but which have clearly for

purpose the closer and more complex association and co-ordination of the

Contrasting Traits of the two sides of the body.

CHAPTER V

MASCULINE MOTHERS PRODUCE EMASCULATE SONS BY MISAPPROPRIATING THE

LIFE-POTENTIAL OF MALE OFFSPRING

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

I

Mendel found that the hybrid plants resulting from his cross-breedings

of Dominants with Recessives produced, when mated with similar hybrids,

sex-cells of pure Dominant and sex-cells of pure Recessive types, and,

moreover, a proportion of sex-cells of mixed type, corresponding to the

grey rabbit-offspring of a black rabbit that has mated with a white.

So too, are found among humans, four types of men and women such as

might be expected under my application of Mendelian doctrine:

_Homozygotes_ for Traits, or pure typical men and women--Dominant males

and Recessive females, respectively; and _Heterozygotes_ for Traits, or

mixed types--Dominant females and Recessive males.

Of the pure Masculine type, are men who are wholly male in body, mind

and bent; active, energetic, enterprising; pioneers of material

progress; State-builders, city-builders, trade-builders, financiers,

explorers, soldiers, men of affairs. Of the Mixed type, are men who,

while being virile of body and mind, possess nevertheless a greater

admixture of womanly quality than is strictly normal. These are the

artists, poets, writers, doctors, priests, philanthropists.

Among women also, are two kindred orders; the wholly womanly--pure

unalloyed types of natural woman, wife and mother, sister, friend; and

women who, while being wholly womanly too in attribute and trend,

possess, nevertheless, underlying manly faculties which give broader

scope and effectiveness to abstract and impersonal issues of their own

sex-characteristics. These are the artists and poets and writers who

present the Woman point of view. They are the Florence Nightingales, the

Charlotte Brontes, Mary Somervilles; the philanthropists, reformers,

born physicians, teachers, nurses, and so forth; whose part it is to

mother, befriend and inspire humanity at large rather than to minister

to individuals. Whose part it is, as well, to extend the tender,

purifying ethics of Woman and The Home ever further and more deeply into

public life, public work, and public administration.

Such men and women possess the characteristics of their own sex fully

differentiated, but tinctured and fructified by more than a normal

quotum of the characteristics of the other. They are quite normal,

however, and are wholly invaluable in their contribution to the world's

affairs. Admirably manly or womanly, they bear but little likeness to

the hereditarily-defective or to the artificially-manufactured

species--mannish women and womanish men. They deviate from the essential

Man and Woman types by degrees of overlapping in the higher mental

attributes. In all the main characteristics of Sex, physical, mental and

functional, they are completely men and women. The abnormal mixed types

are, on the contrary, more or less degenerate, structurally,

functionally and mentally. These persons of natural Mixed Types are

Nature's workers rather than the parents of her Races. The daily round

is too restricted for them. Their abilities and bent claim wider fields.

The home cannot contain them. It is too round to fit their angles. They

are hampered by its reciprocities, stifled by its personal atmosphere,

restive beneath its obligations. And not seldom they succeed in making

homes as uncomfortable for others as they themselves find such.

These Heterodox--of which mould Genius is--are indispensable to spur and

quicken human progress, while adding nothing to the personal evolution

of the Human Type. They advance the standards and the ethics of Humanity

by creating ideals in Art, in Literature, in Politics, in Reform and

Philanthropy. But only too often they fall short, in their own lives, of

the standards and ideals they establish for the world at large.

The Advance-guard of Faculty, they break new ground of Mind and Morale

for others to cultivate. Although they themselves frequently quarrel

with life, they make life in general greater and happier for their

fellows. If women, they possess much of the initiative and energy, the

intellect and chivalry of men. But they apply these to womanly ends. If

men, they possess much of the insight and sympathy, the altruism and

creativeness of women. But they devote these to manly achievements.

Herbert Spencer held that Genesis (or reproductive power) and

Individuation (or Self-development) exist in inverse ratio. Which is

because individuation _beyond the normal_ can only be achieved by

drawing upon the vital potential of offspring. Hence, these strong

individualities of Mixed Type--because reproductive power is diminished

in them--but seldom transmit their abilities to offspring. Genius is

frequently sterile. Otherwise, its children are of inferior calibre.

It is in imitation, doubtless, of the natural Mixed Types--which may be

described as a normal deviation from The Normal--that the cult of the

mannish woman is being cruelly and disastrously forced upon our

latter-day girls and women; resulting in wholly deplorable developments.

The woman of natural Mixed-type is essentially womanly in aim and bent.

She does womanly work with virile energy and masculine mental grip. But

she never (or seldom) assumes male proclivities or adopts male habits;

crazes to wear trousers, to ride astraddle, to smoke, spit, swear,

stride, talk slang, or shoot living sentient creatures. Nor does she

otherwise exchange the more highly-evolved and delicate morale and

manners of woman for those of the male. In Art, in Literature, in

Science; in Industry and Reform, her aims and work preserve the womanly

mode and outlook.

II

In consequence of doctrine which, for several generations, has trained

women to develop for their own uses the masculine potential belonging to

sons, many of our present-day boys and girls are seen actually to have

exchanged their natural sex-characteristics. Boys are born now, puny,

neurotic, and effeminate; while girls are strong and male and masterful.

And it is precisely in the families whereof the girls are strong and

male and masterful, that the boys are weakly and effeminate; the

degenerative lapse from The Normal expressing itself, in both sexes, in

terms of abnormal characteristics of the other sex.

That at thirteen, girls now-a-days are taller and heavier than boys of

the same age has been established by the Anthropometrical Committee of

the British Association.

Dr. J. J. Heslop, after carefully observing the health and the physical

growth of children in fourteen elementary schools belonging to the

Stretford (Lancashire) Education Authority, has published a striking

return of his investigations. The following table shows the average

height and weight at this age:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

| | Height. | Weight. |

+-----------------------+--------------------------+-----------------+

|St. Matthew's | Boys 4 ft. 7-3/4 in. | 5 st. 7-3/4 lb. |

| | Girls 4 ft. 9 in. | 5 st. 10-3/4 lb. |

|Cornbrook Park | Boys 4 ft. 8-1/2 in. | 6 st. 0 lb. |

| | Girls 4 ft. 10-1/3 in. | 6 st. 5-1/2 lb. |

|St. Anne's | Boys 4 ft. 7 in. | 5 st. 3-3/4 lb. |

| | Girls 4 ft. 9 in. | 5 st. 10-1/2 lb. |

|Trafford Park | Boys 4 ft. 7-3/4 in. | 5 st. 4 lb. |

| | Girls 4 ft. 9-1/2 in. | 5 st. 8-1/2 lb. |

|Gorse Hill | Boys 4 ft. 8-1/2 in. | 5 st. 10 lb. |

| | Girls 4 ft. 10 in. | 5 st. 11 lb. |

|Seymour Park | Boys 4 ft. 8-2/3 in. | 5 st. 0 lb. |

| | Girls 4 ft. 10 in. | 5 st. 11 lb. |

+-----------------------+-------------------------+------------------+

The most notable development among girls takes place between the

eleventh and thirteenth years.

The opposite bias in this abnormal substitution of alien sex-traits is

due presumably, in both sexes, to an antagonising and neutralising of

the qualities normal to the one sex by emergence of those of the other.

Thus, the boy is puny and emasculate because his impoverished maleness

is too feeble to dominate the Female traits inherent in him, as is

normal to males. The girl is big and crude and masterful because her

impoverished Womanliness is inadequate to inhibit and refine her

inherent Male traits.

The aims of Feminism are being realised in unforeseen developments.

Because in addition to extinguishing the most beautiful and inspiring

order of human qualities, this masculinising of women is burdening the

Race and deteriorating type by producing an ever-increasing number of

neurotic, emasculate men and boys.

III

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

alarmingly high.

The mortality-rate of males is higher always than is that of females,

because of the greater hardships and dangers of men's pursuits. This is

one of the reasons why, although, normally, boys are born in greater

number (about 1050 to every 1000 girls) the female (pre-war) population

of England and Wales exceeded the male population by the huge majority

of 1,205,311.

But the excess of male over female infant-mortality has greatly

increased of late years. In 1860 it was only 9 per cent. In 1913 it had

leapt to the high figure of 23 per cent. And this diminishing vital

power of males begins before birth even, 180 boys being born prematurely

as compared with 145 girls. Of boys born, 7 die from inborn physical

defects, as compared with 6 girls. While, before the age of three

months, 4 boys die to every 3 girls. Among 1000 infants dying before

they are a year old, only 96 are girls, as compared with 120 boys.

Recent statistics show that in rural Westmoreland, 48 boys under a year

old died, while only 21 girls of the same age succumbed. In Wiltshire,

the ratio was _135 boys to 78 girls_.

To quote from a writer on these startling statistics of the

Registrar-General:--

"Tuberculous diseases, convulsions, intestinal troubles, bronchitis

and pneumonia, and other maladies, all kill more boy than

girl-infants in their first year. The figures are surprising.

Omitting fractions, we find that among 1000 infants of each sex 21

boys die of intestinal troubles to 17 girls; 10 boys die of

convulsions to 8 girls; 21 boys die from bronchitis and pneumonia

to 17 girls; and 14 boys from other causes to 11 girls.

Whooping-cough stands alone, carrying off 3.15 girls to 2.65 boys.

Even when chloroform or ether is given for the purposes of an

operation it kills more boys than girls."

It may be objected that, according to my view, the mortality of girls,

bred of constitutionally impoverished males, should likewise have

increased. But this high mortality among boy-infants and children must

so weed out the weakliest males that many of these do not live to

become fathers. Moreover, by developing into abnormal dominance the

_male_ potential in her, the mother de-vitalises sons more than she

de-vitalises daughters.

Further, these crude hoyden-sisters of the weakly boys fail rather in

the higher attributes of Sex than in mere survival-power. They survive,

but they are marred in type by the stigmata of sex-immaturity or

abnormality.

Increasing sex-impoverishment is bringing into vogue--almost as a matter

of routine--the performance on male infants of an unnatural (and a

degenerative) Jewish rite.

IV

Of the many theories advanced to explain the determination of Sex in

offspring, the true one is, undoubtedly, the relative parental power of

the respective parents.

Normally, this being well-balanced, the ratio of the sexes is about

equal; the preponderance being on the male side, however, owing to the

maternal parental potential being normally greater, because conserved by

reason of her less onerous role in life. When parental potential is

relatively greater in the father, female offspring is born. When greater

in the mother, male offspring results. In the families of men notably

virile, daughters preponderate. In those of women notably womanly, sons

are in the majority. (Presuming in such case the parent of the other sex

to be of average potence.)

The preponderance of male-births during War-conditions is due to the

fact that by far the greater stress of these conditions, with consequent

depletion of vital reserves, falls upon the males. Hence the women--who

although depleted likewise by the increased demands upon them, are less

vitally exhausted than the men are--become relatively prepotent in

parental potential. The more virile men being absent on military duty,

moreover, the less virile members of the sex it is who preponderate in

the paternal role.

Other parental factors, as of age, health and circumstance, which affect

the sex of offspring, do so _indirectly_ by their effects upon the

relative vital and parental potential of mother and father.

In corroboration of the view that power conserved in the mother

engenders Maleness and masculine vigour in offspring, I have received

the following letter from the Head-mistress of the village-school of

Corley:

"I was much interested in your article _re Boy-babies_. I think my

school here is unique, there being 86 children on the roll, of whom

57 are boys and 29, girls. And of the children in the village who

will be of age for admission this year, 7 are boys and 3, girls.

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

One family has 7 boys and 2 girls.

" " " 6 " " 0 "

Two families have 5 " " 1 girl each.

" " " 4 " " 1 " "

"Of one family reckoning 6 boys (1 dead; making 7 in all) the

mother has but one leg--the other having been amputated when she

was fourteen.[2] _None of the mothers here (so for as I can learn)

do work outside their homes_; except in odd cases, an odd day's

washing or cleaning.

"_None do regular work on farms, or otherwise._

"All the children are well-fed, clean and well clothed. Our Medical

Nurse says she finds the finest babies here--of the whole of her

district. For 57 years the yearly returns in School have shown a

great preponderance of boys over girls."

The writer contrasts this Utopian order of things with her experience of

the rickety and otherwise diseased and defective states of

school-children whose mothers were employed in factories.

V

It would seem that the embryological development of the male brain and

nervous system, it is which demands more of vital expenditure on the

part of the mother than does that of the female brain; less elaborately

differentiated as is this in respect of concrete intellection and

physical adaptation.

For this reason, not only is more constitutional vitality on the

mother's part required for the production of sons--and more particularly

of virile sons--but the production of male offspring entails more

stress, and exacts a greater toll, physical and psychical, than does the

ante-natal nurture of the female embryo. Mothers who have borne female

children with but little constitutional strain or suffering may be

greatly debilitated, even invalided, during pregnancy with male

offspring. One finds women permanently weakened in constitution and

function, indeed, from the strain of producing a male. In such cases,

the male may be exceptional of type. Or the mother may be of

exceptionally low vitality.

It has been argued that defect and degeneracy, as hare-lip,

cleft-palate, clubbed or webbed-foot, are more common in the male

because he is normally less highly-developed than the female is. The

contrary is obviously the case. In creating a difficult and a simpler

thing, there will necessarily be more failures in the difficult than in

the simpler product. Being nearer to Nature, the female is usually more

true to the normal type of species. But the type is not so fully

differentiated, or specialised in relation to environment, as is the

male.

It is significant that the female _aphis_, when its vital potential is

stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the

male, but breeds _females_ only. Supporting not only the view that the

female is the rootstock of species, while the male is, so to speak, an

alien grafted upon it, but indicating too, that the production of

females represents less output of reproductive energy, since one sex

alone is able to accomplish this.

VI

Absence both of womanly emotion and of spiritual attribute disqualifies

the faces of the greater number of our modern "beauties" from being

truly beautiful. They lack those last exquisite touches which psychical

qualities bestow; sweetness, tenderness, gaiety, pensiveness, mystery,

mockery, witchery, wistfulness, surrender, resistance, maidenhood,

motherhood--the celestial and the terrestrial melting into one another

like the colours of the rainbow.

Since evolution is advancing in some stock, modern beauty is, no doubt,

of higher calibre than has been attained in any previous epoch. But for

the most part, the faces of our handsome women are pre-eminently

pagan--bold, sophisticated, clever; without sweetness, softness,

imagination, sensitiveness--in a word, without Soul. The outlines,

howsoever fine, are hard and antipathetic in their uncompromising

firmness. The eyes are cold and critical and challenging, so that their

relentless gaze is sometimes rather of the nature of a blow than it is a

sympathy.

Owing to that setting of the jaw which attends strong muscular action,

the shaping bones of the faces of developing girls thicken and coarsen,

and the naturally delicate, beautiful contours of chin and of cheek

deteriorate to the crude and heavy lower jaws characteristic of a very

large order of the sex to-day.

The weak receding, or the sharply-pointed chin of the over-feminised

type--both early-Victorian and modern--errs in the other direction. To

give fine balance to the face and form--as to the mind--the Male traits

must be duly represented. These broaden and strengthen the curves, and

preserve them from lapsing to narrowness and feebleness; lending touches

of straightness and firmness which nobly enhance the graces. In excess,

they mar and deface, however; as is exemplified in the strong and

slovenly features, without drawing or delicacy, which characterise the

new type of girl being turned out by our schools and colleges, most of

which make now-a-days a speciality of sports. Similar heavy jaws and

blunt, amorphous features are replacing in our working-girls, de-sexed

by masculine employments, the classic, nobly-modelled lineaments which

made our Anglo-Saxon Race once the most beautiful, as it was the most

vigorous and enterprising, of the nations. Such faces may be deplorably

senseless for the sense--and lack of sensibility--in them.

The facial type of the opposite extreme is ultra-feminine--a cameo-like

reversion to an earlier Victorian physiognomy, to which several

generations of mothers have failed to add any new quality. But, unlike

its Victorian prototype, the modern ultra-feminine face lacks blood and

emotion, and shows like a faded attenuation thereof. The cold, delicate

features, with the pinched nostrils which, owing to adenoid

obstruction, have never expanded to a full, inspiring breath of Life,

suggest further cameo-comparison; as being the daintily-carven shell of

an extinct creature.

So devitalised and neurasthenic are many of our pretty young girls, that

their flowerlike faces, topping over-tall and undeveloped bodies,

suggest delicate blossoms crowning long attenuated, sapless stems.

Neither faces nor bodies are vitalised and athrill with powers rooted in

healthful organs; vivified by healthful functions, and instinct with

warm, iron-rich, magnetic blood. They show that making for beauty which

is inherent in the Woman-traits, but which, in latter-day girls, owing

to defective constitutional vigour or to educational, social or

industrial exhaustion, has been able to realise itself only in sickly

and weed-like development.

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

as vitalities.

Severed from their natural roots in Life and vital function, they

resemble nothing more than charming cut-blossoms gracefully fading on

drawing-room shelves.

The truth is that girls brought up on modern strenuous methods skip the

years between 16 and 26. If young and fresh at 16, all at once we find

them 26 in constitution and in temperament--a little lean, a little

lined, a little wan, a little shrill, a little chill, and only too often

more than a little disillusioned and cynical--in a word already

_passees_. Some are, of course, an interesting and attractive 26, but

the fresh, warm, vital and beautiful years from 17 to 27, the years of a

natural woman's most charming bloom of mind and body, have dropped from

their lives, like petals from roses. So that our girls in their 'teens

require to hide the ravages of time by every sort of artifice. And at 26

in years, they are approaching the forties in constitution and

temperament; are even keen on politics, cards, finance--resorts,

pre-eminently, of materialistic middle-age.

This blighting of young womanhood, with loss of youthful bloom and

responsiveness, it is that has led to the decadent and demoralising

vogue of the Flapper. Since, beyond all things, men seek vital youth and

freshness in the other sex, to find it now-a-days, they must seek it in

children.

VII

Deplorable are the degenerative processes by way of which those noble

natural characteristics of the Woman-sex which Nature has achieved by

ages of evolutionary advance may be observed to lapse, and are presently

all but obliterated from the woman form and face.

Increasingly the curves straighten; the conflict between straight lines

and curves occasioning wrinkles. The jaw squares. The lips lose womanly

fullness, sweetness, and their natural colour and texture of

rose-leaves; becoming thin and pale and stern. Shadows gather round

them, foreshadowing, it may be, a masculine growth of hair. Hair loses

lustre and grows sparse, particularly above the brows. The chin loses

its feminine softness; rigidity and grimness being substituted. Eyes

lose fullness, tenderness, brilliance, and woman's normal melting

expression. The glance grows chill, hard, shrewd, direct. Crowsfeet mar

the modelled lids. The serene, inspiring woman-brows are furrowed by the

permanent frown of eye-strain or of nervous tension. The voice falls

flat and metallic, or drops into gruffness and harshness; losing its

delicate tuneful inflections, its sympathetic timbre, its joyous

quality. The cheeks hollow; the white temples are wrecked.

In the faces of women whose systems are functioning healthfully, a

number of exquisite artistries in cellular texture of skin and in

tinting appear; the skin beneath the eyes differing from that of

the cheeks, that of the brows differing from that of the chin,

that above the mouth from that below, and so forth. In women

subjected to constitutional strain, all these exquisite artistic

differentiations--product of incalculable evolutionary developments--are

obliterated; the skin over the whole face becoming of the same grain and

hue, as is normal to the male. The body becomes spare and sinewy, or set

and spread; its movements heavy and abrupt. And more and more the hidden

male emerges from the wreckage. The male right arm, swinging like a

pendulum, suggests itself as being the motive-power of the ungraceful

mechanism.

With the increasing maleness of physique, male mental proclivities

develop; obsessions to wear trousers, to smoke, to stride, to kill, and

otherwise to indulge the masculine bent.

* * * * *

It may be objected that Beauty takes too high a place in the counsels of

this book. _Beauty is Normality_, however. Nature, in her every aim and

handiwork, makes beyond every other thing for grace. Weed and moth,

shell and beetle, humming-bird and dragon-fly--all are lovely in

technique and artistry. Plainness and uncouthness in humans only too

often belie noble mind or disposition. This results, however, from such

failure of vital resources that the individual had fine material only to

equip his mind, and none left over to adorn his body.

One sees the converse too, where all the available potential of beauty

has been lavished on handsome exteriors.

Plainness is a mark of abnormality. The victim may be normal in other

respects. But in this, he or she is abnormal. And more particularly

_she_--since Woman is both medium and Creatrix of living harmony and

grace. So is comeliness declining, however, that one of the

specifications of a recent Baby-Competition was that beauty would not be

a necessary qualification.

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

children.

VIII

The Male cult is impressed now at the earliest age. Some of our hapless

little girls, in consequence of having been subjected early to strain of

masculine drill, hockey, cricket and other rough and strenuous

exertions, are more like colts or smaller-sized bullocks in their crude

conformation and ungainly movements, as also in their crude mentality

and manners, than they are like charming human maids.

Few developments in life are prettier or more engaging than is a natural

little girl. The sex of her, with its fair Woman-attributes, reveals

itself early in children of high organisation. Crowned by her curls, in

her simple white frock, she is as fresh and dainty, as winsome and

elusive as a fairy. Her little Woman-soul begins to make for beauty ere

ever she can walk. Ere ever she can walk, she moves her limbs in rhythm

of the dance. She tries to sing. She stretches out a tiny finger and

reverently touches a bright colour--a blue ribbon, a gold button, a pink

flower on a chintz. Set her in a field, she runs to cram her hands with

daisies. She fills, within the House of Life, an exquisite small niche

that nothing else can fill.

Yet now they are cropping her fair curls, are exchanging her white frock

for masculine knickers. They are training her soft limbs and exquisite

elastic movements to the hard and rigid action of the soldiers' drill

and march; are teaching her to stride her pony that once she sat as

prettily and lightly as a bird; are making a hard, boisterous tom-boy of

her, with lusty, hairy limbs and uncouth manners; perverting all her

natural highly-differentiated delicate attributes and graces to clumsy

lower-grade form and activities.

They have robbed her of her Doll, whose helplessness and wax perfection

fostered sentiments of worship, tenderness and ministry in her. They

have given her a whipping-top, which--unlike the boy, who pleasures in

the skill and mechanism of its handling--she lashes with contorted

features and neurotic spitefulness.

With characteristic scorn of physical disability, Feminism contemns old

age as disease or degeneracy--a weakness to be combated with latter-day

strenuousness, cloaked by a counterfeit youthfulness, forced exertions

(even games!) simulated youthful zests and gaieties.

Beyond all things, women are exhorted not to allow themselves to "grow

old" as their grandmothers did, sitting, comely and tranquil and wise,

at their quiet firesides.

Yet the truth is, Age is a natural beautiful phase; in its way, as

natural, as healthful and as beautiful as are any of the younger

seasons. Calm and stately as the snows of Nature's winter, as Nature's

winter shows us, old age does not presage death--because there is no

Death. That we call Death is but a temporary Recession from the Outer

and Terrestrial to the Inner and Celestial zone of Being. And with the

vital quietude and longer-sightedness of eyes, come spiritual quickening

and longer-sightedness of mental view. So that both eyes and mind

perceive The Outer more and more obscurely, focusing more and more on

The Remote. The stream of life runs stilly for the reason that it runs

more deep; centring again to that Within and Spiritual, whence it issued

in Birth, and will issue again in re-Birth.

Compare such serene-faced, dignified age, cause to all of reverence and

tenderness, for the mystery and pathos of its wise and tranquil

resignation--Compare such with the restless, harried, malcontent old age

of modern counsels!

IX

Before the advent of that admirable institution, the Eugenics Education

Society, for the establishment of a new Science of Heredity, as, too, of

a new propaganda of Race-Culture, vital and illuminating data, not only

of supreme scientific interest but, moreover, of the greatest practical

significance, passed, for the most part, unnoted.

I venture to believe, however, that Eugenic propaganda has been too much

in the direction of eliminating defect from the Race by prohibiting

marriage to the so-called "Unfit." Whereas the true way of Racial

health, of normality and excellence, is, surely, to eliminate from life

the many conditions, material, economic, and personal, which make for

Unfitness--which preclude, indeed, the survival of little save

Unfitness.

For since we are not in the secret of Nature's aims, and are wholly in

the dark as to the human type for which she is aiming, to prohibit

parenthood to any but the flagrantly abnormal, the insane and imbecile,

the epileptic and the hopelessly-diseased, might be to quench the

evolution of such higher Fitness as we are not qualified to foresee.

That which shows like disability in one age may be the incipient ability

of a later. In cruder, primitive days, when standards of Fitness were

physical strength, rapacity and cunning, honesty and mercy, and more

delicate organisation of body--the starting-points of new routes of

evolutionary development--would have been condemned as worthy only of

extermination.

In sickly and declining stock there may exist, moreover, an ebbing vein

of rare faculty, which, re-vitalised by a due potential of maternal

re-creative power, might come to throb with genius.

Realising all the factors--the innumerable lives, the incalculable

personal traits, endeavours and experiences, that have gone to make the

Individualism of any strain of stock, and realising that just these

factors of Individualism can have occurred in one line only of human

ascent and can never be repeated, it becomes clear that summarily to

extinguish any human strain, by arbitrary prohibition, would be to

exterminate a unique branch of the great Life-tree, and thereby to

deprive the Race of a specialised route of further ascent; a route which

no other stock could supply.

The fact that great families, with great histories and talents behind

them, fall into decadence shows that even in decadent stock are

inherences of greatness which might be recruited to greatness again.

While apart from all this, the right of Parenthood, with the

evolutionary impulse to character and faculty consequent upon the

exercise of parental functions, is the birthright of every individual

capable of fulfilling such. The counsel of Selective Parenthood is

dangerous doctrine, indeed. Given Life, Nature by her methods of Disease

is able to eliminate stock too deteriorate for, or beside her purpose.

But she alone knows her purpose. And she alone can judge as to what is

intrinsic Fitness for Survival.

Selective Parenthood makes, moreover, for the elimination of those

valuable object-lessons of inherited defect and disease, whereby Nature

points her inestimable morals of healthy and disciplined living. For

evasion, too, of those penalties and burdens in the care and maintenance

of the Unfit, which a nation justly incurs by such social wrongs and

maladministrations as are largely responsible for disease and defect.

The doctrine of operative sterilisation is not only humanly repugnant

but, in view of the psychological import of every physical function, it

is essentially evil.

X

Some momentous morals of the Feminist trend are pointed by the

Insect-world, which may be regarded as a devolutionary back-water,

wherein Life is slowly ebbing toward extinction by fluctuating out in

ever smaller, meaner, drabber, ineffective, pulseless and spectral

existences--chill and teeming myriads unwarmed by the throb of emotion,

unillumined by the light of Mind. Dust which, raised from dust by power

of Life, has caught the trick of living, and goes on living and

perpetuating, without cause or impulse other than age-old, time-worn

mechanistic habit imparted by the state of living.

And in this phantom under-world of Decadence, cast by the shadow of Life

and peopled with distorted images thereof, the females are

Dominant--larger in size, stronger, more active, more enterprising and

ferocious than the males. As in the world of Vegetation, by way whereof

Matter first quickened into Life, so in this realm of _Insectivorae_ by

way of which Life is gravitating back to the inertia of Inorganic

Matter, in ever shallower, denser and more sluggish strata, the male is

seen as appanage and victim of the female.

In the beehive, he appears as ineffective drone amid a throng of

strenuous neuter female-workers. And a female is his Queen.

Significant again is it that insect-females are seen increasingly to

have emancipated themselves from mother-instincts and maternal

functions, as regards nurture or affection for their young. The single

process wherein the warring males and snarling females of finer fierce,

evolving species sheathe their claws and mute their hates in a

co-operative, self-effacing instinct--Reproduction, here in this

disintegrating world of Devolution, functions without welding spark, or

lighting gleam of parent-altruism. At best, it is as chill, as

colourless and meticulously mechanical as the interminable tickings of a

world of clockwork. At worst, it is a repulsive rapacity on the part of

females to secure perpetuation. And this secured, they straightway sting

the craven male to death, or tear him limb from limb and ghoulishly

devour him.

Queen Bee leads her vassal suitors so strenuous and dizzying an

ante-nuptial dance, for privilege of mating with her, that only one

survives to claim the prize; the others dropping, dead and dying, in the

wake of her murderous supremacy. And, as with other masculine and

muscular females, her progeny are neuter working-females (sterile) and

emasculate males (drones).

As Feminists demand for human babes, the Bee-mother hands over her

offspring to be brought up by the State. While some other

insect-mothers, having reposited their eggs (to serve as bombs that

explode and devastate their living hosts) straightway abandon them, and

return to the more strenuous and repulsive female-pursuits of this

Phantasmagoria-world--a clockwork kingdom fabricated of Life's debris,

and drably mimicking the throb and motion of its mechanism in ghoulish

mockeries and vacuous reiterations; the while it runs down slowly,

ticking back to the molecular vibration of mineral inertia.

END OF BOOK I

NOTE.--_Mendelian and other readers interested in the more scientific

aspects of the subject are referred to an Appendix at the end of this

volume, in which these issues are further considered and some important

evidences adduced._

FOOTNOTE:

[2] I have observed that lameness in women, by restricting physical

activities and thus conserving vital energy, conduces to male offspring.

The fact may well have been the origin of the Chinese custom of

crippling the feet of female children. In my own professional practice,

by prohibiting all strenuous and exhausting pursuits, intellectual,

social or athletic, before and after marriage, I have succeeded in

securing male offspring in patients whose stock had for generations

given birth to girls only. In those _organically_ de-sexed by male

pursuits, rest will not avail, of course.--_Author._

BOOK II

WOMAN'S PART IN HUMAN DECADENCE

CHAPTER I

DECLINE AND FALL OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DUE TO FEMINISM

"This is the function of our and every age, to grasp the knowledge

already existing, to make it our own, and in so doing to develop it

further and raise it to a higher level. In thus taking it to

ourselves we make it different from what it was."--_Hegel._

I

Ancient history is depressing study.

It shows us peoples rising slowly and laboriously out of states of

barbarism to high degrees of culture and enlightenment, and then, more

or less suddenly, falling upon decline; lapsing to total extinction,

even. One after another, we may watch them climb the Evolutionary Hill,

then slacken pace and struggle on spasmodically. Till presently we find

them steadily losing ground; slowly at first, but, gathering momentum,

regressing more and more rapidly, until finally they are seen racing

headlong to destruction.

Of some among the proudest and the greatest Civilisations, so absolute

has been their ultimate extinction that nothing more than ruined temples

and some statuary remain to mark their quondam glory.

Biologists tell us this is natural. Races, they say--like

individuals--have only a certain life-tenure. They are born, develop,

attain maturity, lapse to old age and then die; just as men do.

The analogy is not sound, however. Because although individual men die,

the stock they leave behind, if duly preserved and replenished by fresh

blood, may live indefinitely. Moreover, such records as remain show

that these past civilisations died, obviously, not of natural old

age--but of disease. Natural old age is sane and wise, and

self-controlled; healthful in mind and in body. Whereas the main

features characterising the decline of these great powers, were

viciousness and licentiousness; physical, mental and moral corruption.

Theirs was no passing in gradual waning of strength and quiet

dissolution; not even in senility. They may be described, on the

contrary, as having rushed helter-skelter upon death in full vigour of

their prime. We see in them, indeed, all the vehemence and

self-destructive forces of "sthenic" disease--disease as it occurs in

strong men struck down in full health. They died in riot, venality, and

lust, and every other form of vice and evil. Clearly, they died

unnaturally--of disease, not naturally of old age.

How and why then did this happen? How and why should disease thus have

stricken these in mid-career? Since history shows the political

institutions, the laws and the administration of many of such mighty

decadents to have reached high levels of excellence, in respect of

justice and intelligence, while Culture, Art and Industry were likewise

notable among them, the causes of their downfall must be looked for

elsewhere than in their sociology.

And since all human processes, sociological as well as natural, have

their roots in Biology, we are led to examine such records as remain,

for evidences of biological failure. Healthy and vigorous races do not

decline in consequence of unjust laws or maladministration. If they are

healthy and vigorous, they reform these.

II

Investigation shows one striking feature as having been common to most

of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and

licence of their women were conspicuous. And realising Woman's

portentous role in Racial advance, it is difficult to believe anything

but that her role must be equally potent in Racial decline.

A nation becomes decadent because the individuals composing it have

become decadent. The individuals composing it can only have become

progressively decadent by progressive hereditary decadences. And since

Woman is the racial reservoir and the Agency of Evolution, hereditary

decline of individuals and nations must have its source in a decline of

mother-power.

History confirms this view. It shows the progress and waxing supremacy

of these great powers to have been concurrent with rising levels of

womanly character and virtue, with high regard for woman by man, with

high estimation and observance by woman of the functions of motherhood

and of The Home. While neglect of the home, contempt for and evasion of

the duties of motherhood, immorality and general licence among their

women characterised their downfall.

And comparing some modern developments with these records of Ruin, one

can but be struck by notable resemblances between these latter and the

present-day trend of all our greater civilisations.

In the decline of Rome, the Roman women went to two extremes. A tendency

that shows increasingly among our modern womanhood. They separated into

two main orders. "Blue-stocking" and "Rake," they were then designated.

"Mannish" and "Womanish," or "Feminist" and "Ultra-Feminine," better

characterise their latter-day presentments.

In America, these two orders of women are known as the "College" and the

"Society" types, respectively. The "College" type makes a cult of

masculinity of body and of brain. The "Society" type makes a cult of

feminine graces and social accomplishments.

In the poorer, as in the superior classes of all nations, similar

extremes are found. One order is virile and hard-working; and for the

most part plain and moral. The other is womanish and pretty; and for the

most part frail.

With us--as with those earlier peoples--the demand for liberty and

unrestricted economic opportunities for women is occasioning contempt

for and evasion of the functions of wife and of mother, emancipation

from the home, increasing absorption in public affairs, fever for

pleasure, lapse of womanly traditions and morale. All of which

developments passed rapidly, in those others, into general laxity,

licence and corruption; culminating finally in total ruin. With them,

the claims of Home and of The Family became, as they are becoming more

and more with us, secondary merely and subsidiary to other pursuits; to

personal ambitions, public careers, to pleasures, excitements, crazes

for notoriety. Woman's inherent erraticism--defect of her intrinsic

spontaneity, her bent for novelty and strong sensation--degenerated,

under the licence accorded her in ancient Rome, into the appalling

orgies of The Bacchanalia; which were instituted by the sex.

Women attended the displays of gladiators. They watched the wild beasts

tear their victims. They themselves dressed as gladiators, and held

mimic combats. By cult of muscle, they grew taller than the men.

Sallust writes thus of a notorious Roman matron:

"Sempronia had committed many crimes of a boldness _worthy of a man_.

Blest alike in family and beauty, in husband and children, she was

well-read in Greek and Roman literature; could sing, play and dance more

gracefully than any honest woman need; had many of the other

accomplishments of a riotous life. She cared for nothing less than for

decency and modesty."

Fifty years later, Seneca takes up the story of a rapid decadence: "The

ladies do not reckon the years by the number of the Consuls, but by the

number of their husbands."

Much the same licence, extravagance and viciousness of the sex

characterised the greater number of those other old-world wreckages.

The higher Woman-attributes ceased to evolve; ceased to be exercised;

ceased to inspire. Women cultivated solely, or pre-eminently, the

male-side of their natures; muscle, intellect, ambition, concrete

activities, indulgence of sex-instincts. By power of which masculine and

alien proclivities, they increasingly dominated the men, in whom the

virile traits had proportionally declined. Thus, more and more, the

purifying, uplifting and inspiring potence of true Womanhood, together

with the softening refinements of The Home, became ever further

withdrawn from the national life. Thus corruption undermined; and chaos

finally engulfed.

III

Things were different in Ancient Greece.

It has been said that Greece fell because she did not give her women

liberty. For a time comes, in the development of every nation, when its

women must be freed. Or decadence sets in inevitably. And some of those

old civilisations declined, undoubtedly, from lack of progress in this

respect.

It would seem that the first sips of liberty require to be administered

to the sex with caution, however; the effects observed carefully, the

doses increased warily. Otherwise, impulsive and impressionable as they

are, women lose their heads; become intoxicated, and get out of hand.

And once women get out of hand, it is next to impossible to bring them

again under control (as was seen in the outbreaks of Feminist

militancy). Civilisation forbids that men shall deal with them as with

masculine rebels. And fenced thus behind the privileges of their own

sex, when armed with the prerogatives of the other, they may prove

dangerously difficult customers.

In ancient Greece, the wives and mothers and the other reputable women

had but little or no freedom. They lived, for the most part, in

seclusion; dull and unintelligent and uneventful lives. There was no

pure, wholesome, and inspiring social life. The only women who were free

were the _hetairai_, those famous ladies who shed a lurid brilliance

over the corruption and decline of this great State--a decline wherewith

they had, most certainly, much to do. A faction apart from the wives and

mothers--although many among them were courtesans, they stood apart too

from the courtesan class. Women who had found in the unfreed state of

the wife and mother of their epoch, inadequate scope for their impulses

and talents, they broke away from domestic conditions, to form a coterie

of free lances--a cultured, brilliant and alluring band of renegades,

sought and esteemed for their beauty and intelligence by all men;

aristocrat, philosopher, and pleasure-seeker.

More likely than that Greece fell because she did not emancipate her

women, it is that she fell because the women who emancipated themselves

abandoned the roles of wife, of mother, and other reputable functions.

For these Grecian _hetairai_ comprised, in the main, the flower of their

generation. One sees them, indeed, as brilliant Racial poison-blossoms,

greedily appropriating and exploiting to their own purposes the nation's

beauty and the nation's talent, its aspirations, potence,

passion--without transmitting any of these racial attainments to a later

generation. In place of endowing their kind with such nobler light and

faculty, inspiration and sweetness, as supply a people's evolutionary

impulse, they abandoned the home and the sacred and spiritualising

functions of true wifehood, and of the motherhood of such higher living

types as are indispensable to lead a nation's progress.

A kindred movement--modified, for the present, by the more enlightened

traditions of our Century--is foreshadowing itself across the higher

civilisations of our day. More and more, our better types of women (the

misinterpretations of the Feminist Movement having imparted a distorted

bias and direction to their powers) are similarly abandoning the Home,

or are withdrawing their best interests and talents from it; are evading

wholly, or are gravely restricting their maternal obligations to the

Race; regarding children as bye-products, merely, of life--vastly less

important than some hobby or career. In place of realising the new

generation as the Vanguard of Life and Evolution; that which beyond

every other human achievement counts in the Universe.

Worse than this even, more and more, everywhere, women are failing in

the maternal power of transmitting to offspring the health, the beauty,

the abilities and aspirations which are the model and ideals of our age.

IV

A menace to the Race more alarming than that of the hard and mannish

woman (who, because of her lack of womanly attractiveness, is debarred,

in considerable degree, from marriage) is another and less ungraciously

obvious deviation from The Normal--an order of the sex, modern and

artificial, and rapidly increasing in number, over-civilised and

highly-feminised both of physique and of temperament, which may be

described as an Ultra-Feminine, or, in contradistinction to the

Feminist, as a Feminist order.

Their womanhood but lightly rooted in neurotic systems, the women of

this sect are unstable and erratic, seeking distraction for their

restless, ill-balanced forces, in cards, crazes, drugs; fads and freaks.

Unfitted for wifehood and motherhood--some by faulty heredity, but a far

greater number by educational strain and consequent warp--some of these

ultra-feminised and frequently interesting creatures absorb themselves

feverishly in public movements; religious, social or political. Some are

persons of irreproachable morale and ideals; devoted, gifted, wholly

admirable. And being wives not seldom of men as talented, it is

deplorable that warp of culture, unfitting them for motherhood, should

have left such to waste their powers and aspirations in beating the thin

air merely of Utopian propaganda. When, otherwise, they might have led

the true and only way of Progress by endowing the Race with living

presentments and evolving treasuries of the parental ideals and

endowments.

The greater her charm, the nobler her character and talent, the more the

pity is when woman is defective in the power to transmit her high

qualities, or has power to transmit these in inferior degree only; thus

sealing up for ever, or gravely impoverishing a vital spring of living

faculty and individualism--a unique line of Human Ascent which no other

stock can supply, and one which may have been leading up to the

production of genius such as the world has not yet known.

Another--and quite different--sub-order of this neurotic (and

partially-sterilised) type, in losing its higher potential of motherhood

has lost the racial instinct wherein personal virtue is rooted. The

lives of these are free and irregular. Not measures, but men, are their

vogue; to serve as admirers of their charm and talents, as spectators of

their temperamental extravagances. Incapable of the emotions of love,

they seek, are discontented, and seek further when they do not find in

its excitements, the joys and contentment that reside alone in deep and

abiding emotions. The poise and repose, the charm, the refreshment and

the inspiration of true Womanhood are lacking in them. They demand

increasing novelty and change of venue for their ill-ballasted powers

and capricious sensibilities. And this precisely in proportion as they

are deficient in those womanly emotions and illusions which endue the

least and simplest things with glamour and with beauty.

This type, which can scarcely be said to _live_, but merely to frolic

through life, is pre-eminently dangerous to progress. Because, while

possessing the psychology, the appeal and influence of women, some of

these have cast off, utterly, the traditions, the nobler aspirations and

the functions of the best womanhood.

V

It is universally admitted that a bad woman is far more wicked than a

bad man is. She is more callous, ruthless, wanton and debased. The

irresponsibility regarding concrete affairs (innate in a sex whereof The

Concrete is only secondarily the province) makes her a dangerous and a

demoralising factor when her acquired male brain and activities (for the

clever, bad woman is always of masculine bent) over-ride her own natural

aptitudes. Because the powers she has artificially acquired--in

substitution for her native ones--do not alter her inherent constitution

of a creature builded upon instincts; instincts which her native higher

qualities are alone adequate to guide and inspire. One may acquire some

of the characteristics of an opposite sex, _but never the morale_; which

is inborn and inherent to the natural sex-characteristics.

Faculty declines in the inverse order of its development. The bloom and

beauty of the peach and of the flower are the last things to come--and

the first to go. So, in forfeiting her womanly qualities, woman forfeits

earliest the best of these. Love and purity and spiritual aspiration

perish first; with the result that the lower-grade female Subconscious

emotionalism, instinct and palpitant with animal impulse, comes into

play.

Man requires to degenerate to far inferior levels than is the case with

woman, before he so loses his normal rationalism as to forfeit his sense

of proportion and of his responsibility with regard to material affairs,

and that stern obligation to conform to environmental conditions which

has been the impelling force of male development. Irresponsibility is in

him an acquired--and a feminine--defect; not an inherent failing of his

sex. The very basis of the manly character is a recognition of the male

responsibility in life's affairs. It was the impulse of man's primal

struggle. It is the mark of his civilised manhood.

Irresponsibility is, on the contrary, innate in woman. It is part of

that spontaneity, plasticity, and versatility which have engendered the

racial evolutionary mutations; and by way of these have engendered the

progressive transitions to ever higher forms. And indispensable as her

native mutability is in making her the agency of evolutionary change, it

is an insecure and a dangerous basis for too heavy a super-structure of

male characteristics, physical or mental; as also for too heavy a burden

of male responsibilities. It disqualifies her for liberty and scope of

action identical with man's, in material affairs.

The further we fit her, moreover (beyond her normal capacity), for such

affairs, by artificially equipping her with masculine aptitudes, the

more we unfit her for her evolutionary role of spontaneous advance. Her

chiefest values lie in the spring and the plasticity which enable her to

adapt her nature to the evolutionary impulses of life inherent in her;

and thereby to engender further human evolution. For this, it is

important that she shall not be moulded on those firmer and more

definitely prescribed lines of masculine development which are

indispensable to the pioneering of material progress. Nor should her

powers be equally differentiated, or similarly expended. They must be

left, in far greater degree, conserved, unformulate and unadapted.

Normally, she is the child of Nature, in whom (because she is the

mother of the human child, who shapes to the maternal model) Nature is

unfolding the type of our Perfecting Humanity. She should remain,

therefore, more or less in the native and spontaneously fructifying

state conducive to evolutionary unfoldment. When she adapts as closely

to concrete conditions as it is imperative for man to do, not only does

she exhaust the potential fertility indispensable to the further

evolution and growth of racial faculty, but her powers lose that mode of

flux which enables them to tide to higher levels.

While man stands for Civilisation, woman stands for Nature. Generatrix

of Life, she is instinct with vital impulses. And when these are not

expended, as is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living

and beloved beings, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic

aberrations. Because, no matter to what degree she may acquire masculine

characteristics and aptitudes, she remains, at core, a creature of

instinct; not of reason. As a creature of instinct she is invaluable to

life--because Life is moulded upon instinct. But instinct and

rationalism function on different planes of mentality. To over-develop

rationalism in her is to quench emotionalism in her, and the higher

illumination of her Supra-conscious faculties; thus rendering her the

prey of smouldering subconscious impulses which burst fitfully and

mischievously into flame.

For Progress, man must be always the leading half and controller in

politics and civic affairs. These are his province. His sex stands for

permanence and conformity--and, accordingly, for uniformity. And

uniformity is the model for Civilisation, making as it does for justice

and the common good.

Woman's non-conformability adapts her admirably to the personal

relations of life, but not to the political. Man builds institutions and

administers them by more or less rigid impersonal rule. Woman transforms

them into homes, and humanises them by individual concessions and

exceptions.

So the two are supplement and complement in the public as in the natural

sphere. But their respective roles are contrary in every mode and issue.

Man's conformity, political and civic, is continually leavened by the

element of non-conformity and change he inherits from his mother, with

her other Woman-traits. But in him, her spontaneity and impulse are so

intelligised and stabilised by his masculine rationalism and bent for

order that, in place of operating emotionally and spasmodically, they

become tempered and restrained. Under his administration, material

advance proceeds slowly, but surely and securely. His masculine

intelligence and sense of responsibility cause him to adjust the

maternal evolutionary impulses,--which he inherits as reformatory and

revolutionary impulses--to the exigencies of practicability, and the

requirements of circumstance.

VI

There is no more difficult, or possibly mischievous, person than a

strong and clever woman whose over-developed masculine energies and

abilities are controlled neither by a man's reason and sense of

responsibility, nor by a woman's natural disabilities, affections and

restraints. She is sometimes prodigiously clever; adding to her male

talents a woman's fertility, versatility, adaptability, complexity and

intuitiveness. And yet with all their gifts, such women accomplish

little but harm--alike to themselves and others.

Erratic, fickle, irrepressible, they are perpetually flying off at

tangents. Now they are one thing too much. Now they are the opposite--in

an equal extreme.

Medleys of contradictions and perversities, they are no sooner repressed

in one direction, or become fatigued by the monotony of any single line

of action, than they burst forth in some other. Their abnormal

mentality and energy, allied to their innate impulsiveness and craving

for change, impel them to break loose from those bonds of affection, of

tradition and of aspiration, which are woman's safeguards. There is in

the nature of most women, this dangerous quicksand of irresponsibility,

which may, in crises, topple and submerge the soundest structure of

education and of habit builded over it. This is seen in the abandon and

anarchy of the sex in riots and in revolutions.

Such women rebels become increasingly a law unto themselves, and see no

reason why all others should not do likewise. They lack the masculine

grip of concrete principles to recognise that general lawlessness and

individual liberty cannot co-exist. Because where every man is free to

do as he pleases, no man is free to do as he pleases, owing to some

other man's abuse of his liberty encroaching on that of his neighbours.

Women of this order are the Cleopatras, Agrippinas, Messalinas and the

Catharines of Russia; the de Pompadours, de Staels, Georges Sands, and

the innumerable other self-centred, unconscionable female-egotists whose

extravagances shriek discordant down the ages.

Lacking both a woman's morals and a man's ethics, they are freaks of

Nature; or are Frankensteins of abnormal culture. When they are not

Empresses, to indulge in shameful licence--their male abilities

exaggerating their woman-instincts to the dimensions of

megalomanias--their inordinate ambitions make them mistresses of crowned

heads, or of others whose rank or wealth supplies their mistresses with

means and scope for their unbridled prodigalities. Privileged by their

sex and by masculine favour, their lawlessness protected from its

merited penalties by the law-abiding of their fellows, they become

intoxicated--frequently insane--as result of their successes and

excesses. The famous courtesans have been (and are still) for the most

part women of this ilk; persons of steel brain and will, without a

woman's aspirations or emotions to soften their self-centredness; nor a

man's code to discipline their wantonness. They make men the instruments

and the victims of their feminine defects, which are all--or nearly

all--of woman they possess; self-consciousness distorted to a monstrous

vanity, emotions dwarfed to greeds and lusts.

One after another, they exploit their victims, by exercise, precisely,

of the same masculine business-abilities and ruthlessness which make men

fraudulent company-promoters, profiteers, or sweaters of the poor. When

one has served their purpose, they cast him off for another.

Cold-blooded, clever, and emotionless, although sometimes sensual in a

fashion purely male (in keeping with their other male proclivities) they

are adventuresses, spies, poisoners, adultresses, monsters; abiding

reproach to a noble sex; terrible example of the fate awaiting that sex,

as penalty for abnormal development of masculine characteristics beyond

the capacity of its Woman-traits to counterpoise and guide.

Power, which strengthens and steadies all but weak men, only too often

drives women to destruction. A factor in this is that those privileges

of their sex which have become, more or less, their civilised

prerogative, preserve them from the salutary harsh and stern rebuffs

which men in like circumstance inevitably encounter.

If women are to have scope and authority identical with men's, then they

must forgo all privileges; must come out from their fence behind strong

arms and chivalry to meet masculine blows in the face, economic and

ethical--if not actual, indeed, as Prevost has predicted.

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