[11] Thus Heron finds that in London during the past fifty years there has been 100 per cent increase in the intensity of the relation between low social birth and high birth-rate, and that the high birth-rate of the lower social classes is not fully compensated by their high death-rate (D. Heron, "On the Relation of Fertility in Man to Social Status," Drapers' Company Research Memoirs, No. I, 1906). As, however, Newsholme and Stevenson point out (Journal Royal Statistical Society, April, 1906, p. 74), the net addition to the population made by the best social classes is at so very slightly lower a rate than that made by the poorest class that, even if we consent to let the question rest on this ground, there is still no urgent need for the wailings of Cassandra.

[12] Sociological Papers of the Sociological Society, 1904, p. 35.

[13] There is a certain profit in studying one's own ancestry. It has been somewhat astonishing to me to find how very slight are the social oscillations traceable in a middle-class family and the families it intermarries with through several centuries. A professional family tends to form a caste marrying within that caste. An ambitious member of the family may marry a baronet's daughter, and another, less pretentious, a village tradesman's daughter; but the general level is maintained without rising or falling. Occasionally, it happens that the ambitious and energetic son of a prosperous master-craftsman becomes a professional man, marries into the professional caste, and founds a professional family; such a family seems to flourish for some three generations, and then suddenly fails and dies out in the male line, while the vigour of the female line is not impaired.

[14] The new social adjustment of a family, it is probable, is always difficult, and if the change is sudden or extreme, the new environment may rapidly prove fatal to the family. Lorenz (Lehrbuch der Genealogie, p. 135) has shown that when a peasant family reaches an upper social class it dies out in a few generations.

[15] See, on this point, Reibmayr, Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies, Vol. I, ch. VII.

[16] Fahlbeck, op. cit., p. 168.

[17] Regeneration implies that there has been degeneration, and it cannot be positively affirmed that such degeneration has, on the whole, occurred in such a manner as to affect the race. Reibmayr (Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies, Bd. I, p. 400) regards degeneration as a process setting in with urbanization and the tendency to diminished population; if so, it is but another name for civilization, and can only be condemned by condemning civilization, whether or not physical deterioration occurs. The Inter-departmental Commission on Physical Deterioration held in 1904, in London, concluded that there are no sufficient statistical or other data to prove that the physique of the people in the present, as compared with the past, has undergone any change; and this conclusion was confirmed by the Director-General of the Army Medical Service. There is certainly good reason to believe that urban populations (and especially industrial workers in factories) are inferior in height and weight and general development to rural populations, and less fit for military or similar service. The stunted development of factory workers in the East End of London was noted nearly a century ago, and German military experience distinctly shows the inferiority of the town-dweller to the country-dweller. (See e.g. Weyl, Handbuch der Hygiene, Supplement, Bd. IV, pp. 746 et seq.; Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, 1905, pp. 145 et seq.) The proportion of German youths fit for military service slowly decreases every year; in 1909 it was 53.6 per cent, in 1910 only 53 per cent; of those born in the country and engaged in agricultural or forest work 58.2 were found fit; of those born in the country and engaged in other industries, 55.1 per cent; of those born in towns, but engaged in agricultural or forest work, 56.2 per cent; of those born in towns and engaged in other industries 47.9 per cent. It is fairly clear that this deterioration under urban and industrial conditions cannot properly be termed a racial degeneration. It is, moreover, greatly improved even by a few months' training, and there is an immense difference between the undeveloped, feeble, half-starved recruit from the slums and the robust, broad-shouldered veteran when he leaves the army. The term "aggeneration"—not beyond criticism, though it is free from the objection to "regeneration"—was proposed by Prof. Christian von Ehrenfels ("Die Aufsteigende Entwicklung des Menschen," Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, April, 1903, p. 50).

[18] It is unnecessary to touch here on the question of infant mortality, which has already been referred to, and will again come in for consideration in a later chapter. It need only be said that a high birth-rate is inextricably combined with a high death-rate. The European countries with the highest birth-rates are, in descending order: Russia, Bulgaria, Roumania, Servia, and Hungary. The European countries with the highest death-rates are, in descending order, almost the same: Russia, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria, and Servia, It is the same outside Europe. Thus Chile, with a birth-rate which comes next after Roumania, has a death-rate that is only second to Russia.

[19] Nystroem (La Vie Sexuelle, 1910, p. 248) believes that "the time is coming when it will be considered the duty of municipal authorities, if they have found by experience or have reason to suspect that children will be thrown upon the parish, to instruct parents in methods of preventive conception."

[20] The directly unfavourable influences on the child of too short an interval between its birth and that of the previous child has been shown, for instance, by Dr. R.J. Ewart ("The Influence of Parental Age on Offspring," Eugenics Review, October, 1911). He has found at Middlesbrough that children born at an interval of less than two years after the birth of the previous child still show at the age of six a notable deficiency in height, weight, and intelligence, when compared with children born after a longer interval, or with first-born children.

[21] Tatler, Vol. II, No. 175, 1709.

[22] "Write Man for Primula, and the stage of the world for that of the greenhouse," says Professor Bateson (Biological Fact and the Structure of Society, 1912, p. 9), "and I believe that with a few generations of experimental breeding we should acquire the power similarly to determine how the varieties of men should be represented in the generations that succeed." But Bateson proceeds to point out that our knowledge is still very inadequate, and he is opposed to eugenics by Act of Parliament.

[23] E. Solmi, La Citta del Sole di Campanella, 1904, p. xxxiv.

[24] Only a year before his death Galton wrote (Preface to Essays in Eugenics): "The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused."

[25] It may perhaps be necessary to remark that by sterilization is here meant, not castration, but, in the male vasectomy (and a corresponding operation in the female), a simple and harmless operation which involves no real mutilation and no loss of power beyond that of procreation. See on this and related points, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. XII.

[26] The term "feeble-minded" may be used generally to cover all degrees of mental weakness. In speaking a little more precisely, however, we have to recognize three main degrees of congenital mental weakness: feeble-mindedness, in which with care and supervision it is possible to work and earn a livelihood; imbecility, in which the subject is barely able to look after himself, and sometimes only has enough intelligence to be mischievous (the moral imbecile); and idiocy, the lowest depth of all, in which the subject has no intelligence and no ability to look after himself. More elaborate classifications are sometimes proposed. The method of Binet and Simon renders possible a fairly exact measurement of feeble-mindedness.

[27] Mott (Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Vol. V, 1911) accepts the view that in some cases feeble-mindedness is simply a form of congenital syphilis, but he points out that feeble-mindedness abounds in many rural districts where syphilis, as well as alcoholism, is very rare, and concludes by emphasizing the influence of heredity; the prevalence of feeble-mindedness in these rural districts is thus due to the fact that the mentally and physically fit have emigrated to the great industrial centres, leaving the unfit to procreate the race.

[28] "Whether germinal variations," remarked Dr. R.J. Ryle at a Conference on Feeble-mindedness (British Medical Journal, October 3, 1911), "be expressed by cleft palate, cataract, or cerebral deficiency of the pyramidal cells in the brain cortex, they may be produced, and, when once produced, they are reproduced as readily as the perfected structure of the face or eye or brain, if the gametes which contain these potentialities unite to form the ovum. But Nature is not only the producer. Given a fair field and no favour, natural selection would leave no problem of the unfit to perplex the mind of man who looks before and after. This we know cannot be, and we know, too, that we have no longer the excuse of ignorance to cover the neglect of the new duties which belong to the present epoch of civilization. We know now that we have to deal with a growing group in our community who demand permanent care and control as well for their own sakes as for the welfare of the community. All are now agreed on the general principle of segregation, but it is true that something more than this should be forthcoming. The difficulties of theory are clearing up as our wider view obtains a firmer grasp of our material, but the difficulties of practice are still before us." These remarks correspond with the general results reached by the Royal Commission on the Feeble-minded, which issued its voluminous facts and conclusions in 1908.

[29] See, for instance, A.F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency, 1908.

[30] The investigation of Bezzola showing that the maxima in the conception of idiots occur at carnival time, and especially at the vintage, has been held (especially by Forel) to indicate that alcoholism of the parents at conception causes idiocy in the offspring. It may be so. But it may also be that the licence of these periods enables the defective members of the community to secure an amount of sexual activity which they would be debarred from under normal conditions. In that case the alcoholism would merely liberate, and not create, the idiocy-producing mechanism.

[31] Godden, Eugenics Review, April, 1911.

[32] Feeble-mindedness and the other allied variations are not always exactly repeated in inheritance. They may be transmuted in passing from father to son, an epileptic father, for instance, having a feeble-minded child. These relationships of feeble-mindedness have been clearly brought out in an important investigation by Davenport and Weeks (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, November, 1911), who have for the first time succeeded in obtaining a large number of really thorough and precise pedigrees of such cases.

[33] It may be as well to point out once more that the possibility of such limited depreciation must not be construed into the statement that there has been any general "degeneration of the race." It maybe added that the notion that the golden age lay in the past, and that our own age is degenerate is not confined to a few biometricians of to-day; it has commended itself to uncritical minds in all ages, even the greatest, as far back as we can go. Montesquieu referred to this common notion (and attempted to explain it) in his Pensees Diverses: "Men have such a bad opinion of themselves," he adds, "that they have believed not only that their minds and souls were degenerate, but even their bodies, and that they were not so tall as the men of previous ages." It is thus quite logically that we arrive at the belief that when mankind first appeared, "there were giants on the earth in those days," and that Adam lived to the age of nine hundred and thirty. Evidently no syndromes of degenerescence there!

[34] The Superintendent of a large State School for delinquent girls in America (as quoted in the Chicago Vice Commission's Report on The Social Evil in Chicago, p. 229) says: "The girls who come to us possessed of normal brain power, or not infected with venereal disease, we look upon as a prize indeed, and we seldom fail to make a woman worth while of a really normal girl, whatever her environment has been. But we have failed in numberless cases where the environment has been all right, but the girl was born wrong."

[35] See e.g. Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 4th ed., 1910, chap IV.

[36] R.L. Dugdale, The Jukes, 4th ed., 1910. It is noteworthy that Dugdale, who wrote nearly forty years ago, was concerned to prove the influence of bad environment rather than of bad heredity. At that time the significance of heredity was scarcely yet conceived. It remains true, however, that bad heredity and bad environment constantly work together for evil.

[37] Joerger, Archiv fuer Rassen-und Gesellschafts-Biologie, 1905, p. 294. Criminal families are also recorded by Aubry, La Contagion du Meutre.

[38] Even during school life this burden is serious. Mr. Bodey, Inspector of Schools, states that the defective school child costs three times as much as the ordinary school child.

[39] I have set forth these considerations more fully in a popular form in The Problem of the Regeneration of the Race, the first of a series of "New Tracts for the Times," issued under the auspices of the National Council of Public Morals.

[40] C.B. Davenport, "Euthenics and Eugenics," Popular Science Monthly, January, 1911.

[41] The use of the terms "fit" and "unfit" in a eugenic sense has been criticized. It is said, for instance, that in a bad environment it may be precisely the defective classes who are most "fit" to survive. It is quite true that these terms are not well adapted to resist hyper-critical attack. The persistence with which they are employed seems, however, to indicate a certain "survival of the fittest." The terms "worthy" and "unworthy," which some would prefer to substitute, are unsatisfactory, for they have moral associations which are misleading. Galton spoke of "civic worth" in this connection, and very occasionally used the term "worthy" (with inverted commas), but he was careful to point out (Essays in Eugenics, p. 35) that in eugenics "we must leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad."

[42] Dr. Toulouse has devoted a whole volume to the results of a minute personal examination of Zola, the novelist, and another to Poincare, the mathematician. Such minute investigations are at present confined to men of genius, but some day, perhaps, we shall consider that from the eugenic standpoint all men are men of genius.

[43] Sterilization for social ends was introduced in Switzerland a few years ago, in order to enable some persons with impaired self-control to be set at liberty and resume work without the risk of adding to the population defective members who would probably be a burden on the community. It was performed with the consent of the subjects (in some cases at their urgent request) and their relations, so requiring no special legislation, and the results are said to be satisfactory. In some American States sterilization for some classes of defective persons has been established by statute, but it is difficult to obtain reliable information as regards the working and the results of such legislation.

[44] When Professor Giddings speaks of the "goal of mankind," it must, of course, be remembered, he is using a bold metaphor in order to make his meaning clearer. Strictly speaking, mankind has no "goals," nor are there any ends in Nature which are not means to further ends.



II

THE CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN[45]

The Origin of the Woman Movement—Mary Wollstonecraft—George Sand—Robert Owen—William Thompson—John Stuart Mill—The Modern Growth of Social Cohesion—The Growth of Industrialism—Its Influence in Woman's Sphere of Work—The Education of Women—Co-education—The Woman Question and Sexual Selection—Significance of Economic Independence—The State Regulation of Marriage—The Future of Marriage—Wilhelm von Humboldt—Social Equality of Women—The Reproduction of the Race as a Function of Society—Women and the Future of Civilization.

I

It was in the eighteenth century, the seed-time of modern ideas, that our great-grandfathers became conscious of a discordant break in the traditional conceptions of women's status. The vague cries of Justice, Freedom, Equality, which were then hurled about the world, were here and there energetically applied to women—notably in France by Condorcet—and a new movement began to grow self-conscious and coherent. Mary Wollstonecraft, after Aphra Behn the first really noteworthy Englishwoman of letters, gave voice to this movement in England.

The famous and little-read Vindication of the Rights of Women, careless and fragmentary as it is, and by no means so startling to us as to her contemporaries, shows Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of genuine insight, who saw the questions of woman's social condition in their essential bearings. Her intuitions need little modification, even though a century of progress has intervened. The modern advocates of woman's suffrage have little to add to her brief statement. She is far, indeed, from the monstrous notion of Miss Cobbe, that woman's suffrage is the "crown and completion" of all progress so far as women's movements are concerned. She looks upon it rather as one of the reasonable conditions of progress. It is pleasant to turn from the eccentric energy of so many of the advocates of women's causes to-day, all engaged in crying up their own particular nostrum, to the genial many-sided wisdom of Mary Wollstonecraft, touching all subjects with equal frankness and delicacy.

The most brilliant and successful exponent of the new revolutionary ideas—making Corinne and her prototype seem dim and ineffectual—was undoubtedly George Sand. The badly-dressed woman who earned her living by scribbling novels, and said to M. du Camp, as she sat before him in silence rolling her cigarette, "Je ne dis rien parceque je suis bete," has exercised a profound influence throughout Europe, an influence which, in the Sclavonic countries especially, has helped to give impetus to the resolution we are now considering. And this not so much from any definite doctrines that underlie her work—for George Sand's views on such matters varied as much as her political views—as from her whole temper and attitude. Her large and rich nature, as sometimes happens in genius of a high order, was twofold; on the one hand, she possessed a solid serenity, a quiet sense of power, the qualities of a bonne bourgeoise, which found expression in her imperturbable calm, her gentle look and low voice. And with this was associated a massive, almost Rabelaisian temperament (one may catch glimpses of it in her correspondence), a sane exuberant earthliness which delighted in every manifestation of the actual world. On the other hand, she bore within her a volcanic element of revolt, an immense disgust of law and custom. Throughout her life George Sand developed her strong and splendid individuality, not perhaps as harmoniously, but as courageously and as sincerely as even Goethe.

Robert Owen, who, like Saint-Simon in France, gave so extraordinary an impulse to all efforts at social reorganization, and who planted the seed of many modern movements, could not fail to extend his influence to the region of sex. A disciple of his, William Thompson, who still holds a distinguished position in the history of the economic doctrines of Socialism, wrote, under the inspiration of a woman (a Mrs. Wheeler), and published in 1825, an Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. It is a thorough and logical, almost eloquent, demand for the absolute social equality of the sexes.[46]

Forty years later, Mill, also inspired by a woman, published his Subjection of Women. However partial and inadequate it may seem to us, this was at that day a notable book. Mill's clear vision and feminine sensibilities gave freshness to his observations regarding the condition and capacity of women, while his reputation imparted gravity and resonance to his utterances. Since then the signs in literature of the breaking up of the status of women have become far too numerous to be chronicled even in a volume. It is enough to have mentioned here some typical initiatory names. Now, the movement may be seen at work anywhere, from Norway to Italy, from Russia to California. The status which women are now entering places them, not, as in the old communism, in large measure practically above men, nor, as in the subsequent period, both practically and theoretically in subordination to men. It places them side by side, with like rights and like duties in relation to society.

II

Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Owen, Mill—these were feathers on the stream. They indicated the forces that had their source at the centre of social life. That historical movement which produced mother-law probably owed its rise, as well as its fall, to demands of subsistence and property—that is, to economic causes. The decay of the subsequent family system, in which the whole power is concentrated in the male head, is being produced by similar causes. The early communism, and the modes of action and sentiment which it had produced, still practically persisted long after the new system had arisen. In the patriarchal family the woman still had a recognized sphere of work and a recognized right to subsistence. It was not, indeed, until the sudden development of the industrial system, and the purely individualistic economics with which it was associated, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that women in England were forced to realize that their household industries were gone, and that they must join in that game of competition in which the field and the rules had alike been chosen with reference to men alone. The commercial and industrial system, and the general diffusion of education that has accompanied it, and which also has its roots in economic causes, has been the chief motive force in revolutionizing the status of women; and the epoch of unrestricted competition on masculine lines has been a necessary period of transition.[47]

At the present time two great tendencies are visible in our social organization. On the one hand, the threads of social life are growing closer, and organization, as regards the simple and common means of subsistence, is increasing. On the other hand, as regards the things that most closely concern the individual person, the sphere of freedom is being perpetually enlarged. Instead of every man digging a well for his own use and at his own free pleasure, perhaps in a graveyard or a cesspool, we consent to the distribution of water by a central executive. We have carried social methods so far that, instead of producing our own bread and butter, we prefer to go to a common bakery and dairy. The same centralizing methods are extending to all those things of which all have equal need. On the other hand, we exercise a very considerable freedom of individual thought. We claim a larger and larger freedom of individual speech and criticism. We worship any god we choose, after any fashion we choose. The same individual freedom is beginning to invade the sexual relationships. It is extending to all those things in regard to which civilized men have become so variously differentiated that they have no equal common needs. These two tendencies, so far from being antagonistic, cannot even be carried out under modern conditions of life except together. It is only by social co-operation in regard to what is commonly called the physical side of life that it becomes possible for the individual to develop his own peculiar nature. The society of the future is a reasonable anarchy founded on a broad basis of Collectivism.

It is not our object here to point out how widely these tendencies affect men, but it is worth while to indicate some of their bearings on the condition of women. While genuine productive industries have been taken out of the hands of women who work under the old conditions, an increasingly burdensome weight of unnecessary duties has been laid upon them. Under the old communistic system, when a large number of families lived together in one great house, the women combined to perform their household duties, the cooking being done at a common fire. They had grown up together from childhood, and combination could be effected without friction. It is the result of the later system that the woman has to perform all the necessary household duties in the most wasteful manner, with least division of labour; while she has, in addition, to perform a great amount of unnecessary work, in obedience to traditional or conventional habits, which make it impossible even to perform the simple act of dusting the rooms of a small house in less than perhaps an hour and a half. She has probably also to accomplish, if she happens to belong to the middle or upper classes, an idle round of so-called "social duties." She tries to escape, when she can afford it, by adopting the apparently simple expedient of paying other people to perform these necessary and unnecessary household duties, but this expedient fails; the "social duties" increase in the same ratio as the servants increase and the task of overseeing these latter itself proves formidable. It is quite impossible for any person under these conditions to lead a reasonable and wholesome human life. A healthy life is more difficult to attain for the woman of the ordinary household than for the worker in a mine, for he at least, when the work of his set is over, has two-thirds of the twenty-four hours to himself. The woman is bound by a thousand Lilliputian threads from which there seems no escape. She often makes frantic efforts to escape, but the combined strength of the threads generally proves too strong. There can be no doubt that the present household system is doomed; the higher standard of intelligence demanded from women, the growth of interest in the problems of domestic economy, the movement for association of labour, the revolt against the survivals of barbaric complication in living—all these, which are symptoms of a great economic revolution, indicate, the approach of a new period.

The education of women is an essential part of the great movement we are considering. Women will shortly be voters, and women, at all events in England, are in a majority. We have to educate our mistresses as we once had to educate our masters. And the word "education" is here used by no means in the narrow sense. A woman may be acquainted with Greek and the higher mathematics, and be as uneducated in the wider relationships of life as a man in the like case. How much women suffer from this lack of education may be seen to-day even among those who are counted as leaders.

There are extravagances in every period of transition. Undoubtedly a potent factor in bringing about a saner attitude will be the education of boys and girls together. The lack of early fellowship fosters an unnatural divergence of aims and ideals, and a consequent lack of sympathy. It makes possible those abundant foolish generalizations by men concerning "women," by women concerning "men." St. Augustine, at an early period of his ardent career, conceived with certain friends the notion of forming a community having goods in common; the scheme was almost effected when it was discovered that "those little wives, which some already had, and others would shortly have," objected, and so it fell through. Perhaps the mulierculae were right. It is simply a rather remote instance of a fundamental divergence amply illustrated before our eyes. If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's natures with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth. Another wholesome reform, promoted by co-education, is the physical education of women. In the case of boys special attention has generally been given to physical education, and the lack of it is one among several artificial causes of that chronic ill-health which so often handicaps women. Women must have the same education as men, Miss Faithfull shrewdly observes, because that is sure to be the best. The present education of boys cannot, however, be counted a model, and the gradual introduction of co-education will produce many wholesome reforms. If the intimate association of the sexes destroys what remnant may linger of the unhealthy ideal of chivalry—according to which a woman was treated as a cross between an angel and an idiot—that is matter for rejoicing. Wherever men and women stand in each other's presence the sexual instinct will always ensure an adequate ideal halo.

III

The chief question that we have to ask when we consider the changing status of women is: How will it affect the reproduction of the race? Hunger and love are the two great motor impulses, the ultimate source, probably, of all other impulses. Hunger—that is to say, what we call "economic causes"—has, because it is the more widespread and constant, though not necessarily the more imperious instinct, produced nearly all the great zoological revolutions, including, as we have seen, the rise and fall of that phase of human evolution dominated by mother-law. Yet love has, in the form of sexual selection, even before we reach the vertebrates, moulded races to the ideal of the female; and reproduction is always the chief end of nutrition which hunger waits on, the supreme aim of life everywhere.

If we place on the one side man, as we know him during the historical period, and on the other, nearly every highly organized member of the animal family, there appears, speaking roughly and generally, a distinct difference in the relation which these two motor impulses bear to each other. Among animals generally, economics are comparatively so simple that it is possible to satisfy the nutritive instinct without putting any hard pressure on the spontaneous play of the reproductive instinct. And nearly everywhere it is the female who has the chief voice in the establishment of sexual relationships. The males compete for the favour of the female by the fascination of their odour, or brilliant colour, or song, or grace, or strength, as revealed in what are usually mock-combats. The female is, in these respects, comparatively unaccomplished and comparatively passive. With her rests the final decision, and only after long hesitation, influenced, it seems, by a vaguely felt ideal resulting from her contemplation of the rivals, she calls the male of her choice.[48] A dim instinct seems to warn her of the pains and cares of maternity, so that only the largest promises of pleasure can induce her to undertake the function of reproduction. In civilized man, on the other hand, as we know him, the situation is to some extent reversed; it is the woman who, by the display of her attractions, competes for the favour of the man. The final invitation does not come, as among animals generally, from the female; the decision rests with the man. It would be a mistake to suppose that this change reveals the evolution of a superior method; although it has developed the beauty of women, it has clearly had its origin in economic causes. The demands of nutrition have overridden those of reproduction; sexual selection has, to a large extent, given place to natural selection, a process clearly not for the advantage of the race. The changing status of women, in bestowing economic independence, will certainly tend to restore to sexual selection its due weight in human development.

In so doing it will certainly tend also to destroy prostitution, which is simply one of the forms in which the merging of sexual selection in natural selection has shown itself. Wherever sexual selection has free play, unhampered by economic considerations, prostitution is impossible. The dominant type of marriage is, like prostitution, founded on economic considerations; the woman often marries chiefly to earn her living; here, too, we may certainly expect profound modifications. We have long sought to preserve our social balance by placing an unreasonable licence in the one scale, an equally unreasonable abstinence in the other; the economic independence of women, tending to render both extremes unnecessary, can alone place the sexual relationships on a sound and free basis.

The State regulation of marriage has undoubtedly played a large and important part in the evolution of society. At the present time the advantages of this artificial control no longer appear so obvious (even when the evidence of the law courts is put aside); they will vanish altogether when women have attained complete economic independence. With the disappearance of the artificial barriers in the way of friendship between the sexes and of the economic motive to sexual relationships—perhaps the two chief forces which now tend to produce promiscuous sexual intercourse, whether dignified or not with the name of marriage—men and women will be free to engage, unhampered, in the search, so complicated in a highly civilized condition of society, for a fitting mate.[49]

It is probable that this inevitable change will be brought about partly by the voluntary action of individuals, and in greater measure by the gradual and awkward method of shifting and ever freer divorce laws. The slow disintegration of State-regulated marriage from the latter cause may be observed now throughout the United States, where there is, on the whole, a developing tendency to frequency and facility of divorce. It is clear, however, that on this line marriage will not cease to be a concern to the State, and it may be as well to point out at once the important distinction between State-regulated and State-registered marriage. Sexual relationships, so long as they do not result in the production of children, are matters in which the community has, as a community, little or no concern, but as soon as a sexual relationship results in the pregnancy of the woman the community is at once interested. At this point it is clearly the duty of the State to register the relationship.[50]

It is necessary to remember that the kind of equality of the sexes towards which this change of status is leading, is social equality—that is, equality of freedom. It is not an intellectual equality, still less is it likeness. Men and women can only be alike mentally when they are alike in physical configuration and physiological function. Even complete economic equality is not attainable. Among animals which live in herds under the guidance of a leader, this leader is nearly always a male; there are few exceptions.[51] In woman, the long period of pregnancy and lactation, and the prolonged helplessness of her child, render her for a considerable period of her life economically dependent. On whom shall she be dependent? This is a question of considerable moment. According to the old conception of the family, all the members were slaves producing for the benefit of the owner, and it was natural that the wife should be supported by the husband when she is producing slaves for his service. But this conception is, as we have seen, no longer possible. It is clearly unfair also to compel the mother to depend on her own previous exertions. The reproduction of the race is a social function, and we are compelled to conclude that it is the duty of the community, as a community, to provide for the child-bearer when in the exercise of her social function she is unable to provide for herself. The woman engaged in producing a new member, who may be a source of incalculable profit or danger to the whole community, cannot fail to be a source of the liveliest solicitude to everyone in the community, and it was a sane and beautiful instinct that found expression of old in the permission accorded to a pregnant woman to enter gardens and orchards, and freely help herself. Whether this instinct will ever again be embodied in a new form, and the reproduction of the race be recognized as truly a social function, is a question which even yet lacks actuality. The care of the child-bearer and her child will at present continue to be a matter for individual arrangement. That it will be arranged much better than at present we may reasonably hope. On the one hand, the reckless multiplication of children will probably be checked; on the other hand, a large body of women will no longer be shut out from maternity. That the state should undertake the regulation of the birth-rate we can scarcely either desire or anticipate. Undoubtedly the community has an abstract right to limit the number of its members. It may be pointed out, however, that under rational conditions of life the process would probably be self-regulating; in the human races, and also among animals generally, fertility diminishes as the organism becomes highly developed. And, without falling back on any natural law, it may be said that the extravagant procreation of children, leading to suffering both to parents and offspring, carried on under existing social conditions, is largely the result of ignorance, largely of religious or other superstition. A more developed social state would not be possible at all unless the social instincts were strong enough to check the reckless multiplication of offspring. Richardson and others appear to advocate the special cultivation of a class of non-childbearing women. Certainly no woman who freely chose should be debarred from belonging to such a class. But reproduction is the end and aim of all life everywhere, and in order to live a humanly complete life, every healthy woman should have, not sexual relationships only, but the exercise at least once in her life of the supreme function of maternity, and the possession of those experiences which only maternity can give. That unquestionably is the claim of natural and reasonable living in the social state towards which we are moving.

To deal with the social organization of the future would be to pass beyond the limits that I have here set myself, and to touch on matters of which it is impossible to speak with certainty. The new culture of women, in the light and the open air, will doubtless solve many matters which now are dark to us. Morgan supposed that it was in some measure the failure of the Greeks and Romans to develop their womanhood which brought the speedy downfall of classic civilization. The women of the future will help to renew art and science as well as life. They will do more even than this, for the destiny of the race rests with women. "I have sometimes thought," Whitman wrote in his Democratic Vistas, "that the sole avenue and means to a reconstructed society depended primarily on a new birth, elevation, expansion, invigoration of women." That intuition is not without a sound basis, and if a great historical movement called for justification here would be enough.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] This chapter was written so long ago as 1888, and published in the Westminster Review in the following year. I have pleasure in here including it exactly as it was originally written, not only because it has its proper place in the present volume, but because it may be regarded as a programme which I have since elaborated in numerous volumes. The original first section has, however, been omitted, as it embodied a statement of the matriarchal theory which, in view of the difficulty of the subject and the wide differences of opinion about it, I now consider necessary to express more guardedly (see, for a more recent statement, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. X). With this exception, and the deletion of two insignificant footnotes, no changes have been made. After the lapse of a quarter of a century I find nothing that I seriously wish to withdraw and much that I now wish to emphasize.

[46] The following passage summarizes this Appeal: "The simple and modest request is, that they may be permitted equal enjoyments with men, provided they can, by the free and equal development and exercise of their faculties, procure for themselves such enjoyments. They ask the same means that men possess of acquiring every species of knowledge, of unfolding every one of their faculties of mind and body that can be made tributary to their happiness. They ask every facility of access to every art, occupation, profession, from the highest to the lowest, without one exception, to which their inclinations and talents may direct and may fit them to occupy. They ask the removal of all restraints and exclusions not applicable to men of equal capacities. They ask for perfectly equal political, civil, and domestic rights. They ask for equal obligations and equal punishments from the law with men in case of infraction of the same law by either party. They ask for an equal system of morals, founded on utility instead of caprice and unreasoning despotism, in which the same action, attended with the same consequences, whether done by man or woman, should be attended with the same portion of approbation or disapprobation; in which every pleasure, accompanied or followed by no preponderant evil, should be equally permitted to women and to men; in which every pleasure accompanied or followed by preponderant evil should be equally censured in women and in men."

[47] A period of transition not the less necessary although it is certainly disastrous and tends to produce an unwholesome tension between the sexes so long as men and women do not receive equal payment for equal work. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," as a working man in Blackburn lately put it, "but when the thing of beauty takes to doing the work for 16s. a week that you have been paid 22s. for, you do not feel as if you cannot live without possessing that thing of beauty all to yourself, or that you are willing to lay your life and your fortune (when you have one) at its feet." On the other hand, the working girl in the same town often complains that a man will not look at a girl unless she is a "four-loom weaver," earning, that is, perhaps, 20s. or 25s. a week.

[48] See the very interesting work of Alfred Espinas, Des Societes Animales, which contains many fruitful suggestions for the student of human sociology.

[49] The subtle and complex character of the sexual relationships in a high civilization, and the unhappy results of their State regulation, was well expressed by Wilhehm von Humboldt in his Ideen zu einen Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen, so long ago as 1792: "A union so closely allied with the very nature of the respective individuals must be attended with the most hurtful consequences when the State attempts to regulate it by law, or, through the force of its institutions, to make it repose on anything save simple inclination. When we remember, moreover, that the State can only contemplate the final results of such regulations on the race, we shall be still more ready to admit the justice of this conclusion. It may reasonably be argued that a solicitude for the race only conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man. For after careful observation it has been found that the uninterrupted union of one man with one woman is most beneficial to the race, and it is likewise undeniable that no other union springs from true, natural, harmonious love. And further, it may be observed that such love leads to the same results as those very relations which law and custom tend to establish. The radical error seems to be that the law commands; whereas such a relation cannot mould itself according to external arrangements, but depends wholly on inclination; and wherever coercion or guidance comes into collision with inclination, they divert it still farther from the proper path. Wherefore it appears to me that the State should not only loosen the bonds in this instance, and leave ampler freedom to the citizen, but that it should entirely withdraw its active solicitude from the institution of marriage, and both generally and in its particular modifications, should rather leave it wholly to the free choice of the individuals, and the various contracts they may enter into with respect to it. I should not be deterred from the adoption of this principle by the fear that all family relations might be disturbed, for although such a fear might be justified by considerations of particular circumstances and localities, it could not fairly be entertained in an inquiry into the nature of men and States in general. For experience frequently convinces us that just where law has imposed no fetters, morality most surely binds; the idea of external coercion is one entirely foreign to an institution which, like marriage, reposes only on inclination and an inward sense of duty; and the results of such coercive institutions do not at all correspond to the intentions in which they originate."

[50] Such register should, as Bertillon rightly insisted, be of the most complete description—setting forth all the anthropological traits of the contracting parties—so that the characteristics of a human group at any time and place may be studied and compared. Registration of this kind would, beside its more obvious convenience, form an almost indispensable guide to the higher evolution of the race. I may here add that I have assumed, perhaps too rashly, that the natural tendency among civilized men and women is towards a monogamic and more or less permanent union; preceded, it may be in most individuals, by a more restless period of experiment. Undoubtedly, many variations will arise in the future, leading to more complex relationships. Such variations cannot be foreseen, and when they arise they will still have to prove their stability and their advantage to the race.

[51] As among geese, and, occasionally, it is said, among elephants.



III

THE NEW ASPECT OF THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT

Eighteenth-Century France—Pioneers of the Woman's Movement—The Growth of the Woman's Suffrage Movement—The Militant Activities of the Suffragettes—Their Services and Disservices to the Cause—Advantages of Women's Suffrage—Sex Questions in Germany—Bebel—The Woman's Rights Movement in Germany—The Development of Sexual Science in Germany—the Movement for the Protection of Motherhood—Ellen Key—The Question of Illegitimacy—Eugenics—Women as Law-makers in the Home.

I

The modern conception of the political equality of women with men, we have seen, arose in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its way was prepared by the philosophic thinkers of the Encyclopedie, and the idea was definitely formulated by some of the finest minds of the age, notably by Condorcet,[52] as part of the great new programme of social and political reform which was to some small degree realized in the upheaval of the Revolution. The political emancipation of women constituted no part of the Revolution. It has indeed been maintained, and perhaps with reason, that the normal development of the revolutionary spirit would probably have ended in vanquishing the claim of masculine predominance if war had not diverted the movement of revolution by transforming it into the Terror. Even as it was, the rights of women were not without their champions even at this period. We ought specially to remember Olympe de Gouges, whose name is sometimes dismissed too contemptuously. With all her defects of character and education and literary style, Olympe de Gouges, as is now becoming recognized, was, in her biographer's words, "one of the loftiest and most generous souls of the epoch," in some respects superior to Madame Roland. She was the first woman to demand of the Revolution that it should be logical by proclaiming the rights of woman side by side with those of her equal, man, and in so doing she became the great pioneer of the feminist movement of to-day.[53] She owes the position more especially to her little pamphlet, issued in 1791, entitled Declaration des Droits de la Femme. It is this Declaration which contains the oft-quoted (or misquoted) saying: "Women have the right to ascend the scaffold; they must also have the right to ascend the tribune." Two years later she had herself ascended the scaffold, but the other right she claimed is only now beginning to be granted to women. At that time there were too many more pressing matters to be dealt with, and the only women who had been taught to demand the rights of their sex were precisely those whom the Revolution was guillotining or exiling. Even had it been otherwise, we may be quite sure that Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution and the final arbiter of what was to be permanent in its achievements, would have sternly repressed any political freedom accorded to women. The only freedom he cared to grant to women was the freedom to produce food for cannon, and so far as lay in his power he sought to crush the political activities of women even in literature, as we see in his treatment of Mme de Stael.[54]

An Englishwoman of genius was in Paris at the time of the Revolution, with as broad a conception of the place of woman side by side with man as Olympe de Gouges, while for the most part she was Olympe's superior. In 1792, a year after the Declaration des Droits de la Femme, Mary Wollstonecraft—it is possible to some extent inspired by the brief Declaration—published her Vindication of the Rights of Women. It was not a shrill outcry, nor an attack on men—in that indeed resembling the Declaration—but just the book of a woman, a wise and sensible woman, who discusses many women's questions from a woman's point of view, and desires civil and political rights, not as a panacea for all evils, but simply because, as she argues, humanity cannot progress as a whole while one half of it is semi-educated and only half free. There can be little doubt that if the later advocates of woman's suffrage could have preserved more of Mary Wollstonecraft's sanity, moderation, and breadth of outlook, they would have diminished the difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally. Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great movement which slowly gained force and volume.[55] During the long Victorian period the practical aims of this movement went chiefly into the direction of improving the education of girls so as to make it, so far as possible, like that of boys. In this matter an immense revolution was slowly accomplished, involving the entrance of women into various professions and employments hitherto reserved to men. That was a very necessary preliminary to the extension of the franchise to women. The suffrage propaganda could not, moreover, fail to benefit by the better education of women and their increased activity in public life. It was their activity, indeed, far more than the skill of the women who fought for the franchise, which made the political emancipation of women inevitable, and the noble and brilliant women who through the middle of the nineteenth century recreated the educational system for women, and so prepared them to play their proper part in life, were the best women workers the cause of women's enfranchisement ever had. There was, however, one distinguished friend of the emancipation of women whose advocacy of the cause at this period was of immense value. It is now nearly half a century since John Stuart Mill—inspired, like Thompson, by a woman—wrote his Subjection of Women, and it may undoubtedly be said that since that date no book on this subject published in any country—with the single exception of Bebel's Woman—has been so widely read or so influential. The support of this distinguished and authoritative thinker gave to the woman's movement a stamp of aristocratic intellectuality very valuable in a land where even the finest minds are apt to be afflicted by the disease of timidity, and was doubtless a leading cause of the cordial reception which in England the idea of women's political emancipation has long received among politicians. Bebel's book, speedily translated into English, furnished the plebeian complement to Mill's.

The movement for the education of women and their introduction into careers previously monopolized by men inevitably encouraged the movement for extending the franchise to women. This political reform was remarkably successful in winning over the politicians, and not those of one party only. In England, since Mill published his Subjection of Women in 1869, there have always been eminent statesmen convinced of the desirability of granting the franchise to women, and among the rank and file of Members of Parliament, irrespective of party, a very large proportion have pledged themselves to the same cause. The difficulty, therefore, in introducing woman's suffrage into England has not been primarily in Parliament. The one point, at which political party feeling has caused obstruction—and it is certainly a difficult and important point—is the method by which woman's suffrage should be introduced. Each party—Conservative, Liberal, Labour—naturally enough desires that this great new voting force should first be applied at a point which would not be likely to injure its own party interests. It is probable that in each party the majority of the leaders are of opinion that the admission of female voters is inevitable and perhaps desirable; the dispute is as to the extent to which the floodgates should in the first place be opened. In accordance with English tradition, some kind of compromise, however illogical, suggests itself as the safest first step, but the dispute remains as to the exact class of women who should be first admitted and the exact extent to which entrance should be granted to them.

The dispute of the gate-keepers would, however, be easily overcome if the pressure behind the gate were sufficiently strong. But it is not. However large a proportion of the voters in Great Britain may be in favour of women's franchise, it is certain that only a very minute percentage regard this as a question having precedency over all other questions. And the reason why men have only taken a very temperate interest in woman's suffrage is that women themselves, in the mass, have taken an equally temperate interest in the matter when they have not been actually hostile to the movement. It may indeed be said, even at the present time, that whenever an impartial poll is taken of a large miscellaneous group of women, only a minority are found to be in favour of woman's suffrage.[56] No significant event has occurred to stimulate general interest in the matter, and no supremely eloquent or influential voice has artificially stirred it. There has been no woman of Mary Wollstonecraft's genius and breadth of mind who has devoted herself to the cause, and since Mill the men who have made up their minds on this side have been content to leave the matter to the women's associations formed for securing the success of the cause. These associations have, however, been led by women of a past generation, who, while of unquestionable intellectual power and high moral character, have viewed the woman question in a somewhat narrow, old-fashioned spirit, and have not possessed the gift of inspiring enthusiasm. Thus the growth of the movement, however steady it may have been, has been slow. John Stuart Mill's remark, in a letter to Bain in 1869, remains true to-day: "The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves."

In the meanwhile in some other countries where, except in the United States, it was of much more recent growth, the woman's suffrage movement has achieved success, with no great expenditure of energy. It has been introduced into several American States and Territories. It is established throughout Australasia. It is also established in Norway. In Finland women may not only vote, but also sit in Parliament.

It was in these conditions that the Women's Social and Political Union was formed in London. It was not an offshoot from any existing woman's suffrage society, but represented a crystallization of new elements. For the most part, even its leaders had not previously taken any active part in the movement for woman's suffrage. The suffrage movement had need of exactly such an infusion of fresh and ardent blood; so that the new society was warmly welcomed, and met with immediate success, finding recruits alike among the rich and the poor. Its unconventional methods, its eager and militant spirit, were felt to supply a lacking element, and the first picturesque and dashing exploits of the Union were on the whole well received. The obvious sincerity and earnestness of these very fresh recruits covered the rashness of their new and rather ignorant enthusiasm.

But a hasty excess of ardour only befits a first uncalculated outburst of youthfulness. It is quite another matter when it is deliberately hardened into a rigid routine, and becomes an organized method of creating disorder for the purpose of advertising a grievance in season and out of season. Since, moreover, the attack was directed chiefly against politicians, precisely that class of the community most inclined to be favourable to woman's suffrage, the wrong-headedness of the movement becomes as striking as its offensiveness.

The effect on the early friends of the new movement was inevitable. Some, who had hailed it with enthusiasm and proclaimed its pioneers as new Joans of Arc, changed their tone to expostulation and protest, and finally relapsed into silence. Other friends of the movement, even among its former leaders, were less silent. They have revealed to the world, too unkindly, some of the influences which slowly corrupt such a movement from the inside when it hardens into sectarianism: the narrowing of aim, the increase of conventionality, the jealousy of rivals, the tendency to morbid emotionalism.

It is easy to exaggerate the misdeeds and the weaknesses of the suffragettes. It is undoubtedly true that they have alienated, in an increasing degree, the sympathies of the women of highest character and best abilities among the advocates of woman's suffrage. Nearly all Englishwomen to-day who stand well above the average in mental distinction are in favour of woman's suffrage, though they may not always be inclined to take an active part in securing it. Perhaps the only prominent exception is Mrs. Humphry Ward. Yet they rarely associate themselves with the methods of the suffragettes. They do not, indeed, protest, for they feel there would be a kind of disloyalty in fighting against the Extreme Left of a movement to which they themselves belong; but they stand aloof. The women who are chiefly attracted to the ranks of the suffragettes belong to three classes: (1) Those of the well-to-do class with no outlet for their activities, who eagerly embrace an exciting occupation which has become, not only highly respectable, but even, in a sense, fashionable; they have no natural tendency to excess, but are easily moved by their social environment; some of these are rich, and the great principle—once formulated in an unhappy moment concerning a rich lady interested in social reform—"We must not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs," has never been despised by the suffragette leaders; (2) the rowdy element among women which is not so much moved to adopt the methods for the sake of the cause as to adopt the cause for the sake of the methods, so that in the case of their special emotional temperament it may be said, reversing an ancient phrase, that the means justify the end; this element of noisy explosiveness, always found in a certain proportion of women, though latent under ordinary circumstances, is easily aroused by stimulation, and in every popular revolt the wildest excesses are the acts of women. (3) In this small but important group we find women of rare and beautiful character who, hypnotized by the enthralling influence of an idea, and often having no great intellectual power of their own, are even unconscious of the vulgarity that accompanies them, and gladly sacrifice themselves to a cause that seems to be sacred; these are the saints and martyrs of every movement.

When we thus analyse the suffragette outburst we see that it is really compounded out of quite varied elements: a conventionally respectable element, a rowdy element, and an ennobling element. It is, therefore, equally unreasonable to denounce its vices or to idealize its virtues. It is more profitable to attempt to balance its services and its disservices to the cause of women's suffrage.

Looked at dispassionately, the two main disadvantages of the suffragette agitation—and they certainly seem at the first glance very comprehensive objections—lie in its direction and in its methods. There are two vast bodies of people who require to be persuaded in order to secure woman's suffrage: first women themselves, and secondly their men-folk, who at present monopolize the franchise. Until the majority of both men and women are educated to understand the justice and reasonableness of this step, and until men are persuaded that the time has come for practical action, the most violent personal assaults on cabinet ministers—supposing such political methods to be otherwise unobjectionable—are beside the mark. They are aimed in the wrong direction. This is so even when we leave aside the fact that politicians are sufficiently converted already. The primary task of women suffragists is to convert their own sex. Indeed it may be said that that is their whole task. Whenever the majority of women are persuaded that they ought to possess the vote, we may be quite sure that they will communicate that persuasion to their men-folk who are able to give them the vote. The conversion of the majority of women to a belief in women's suffrage is essential to its attainment because it is only by the influence of the women who belong to him, whom he knows and loves and respects, that the average man is likely to realize that, as Ellen Key puts it, "a ballot paper in itself no more injures the delicacy of a woman's hand than a cooking recipe." The antics of women in the street, however earnest those women may be, only leave him indifferent, even hostile, at most, amused.

It may be added that in any case it would be undesirable, even if possible, to bestow the suffrage on women so long as only a minority have the wish to exercise it. It would be contrary to sound public policy. It would not only discredit political rights, but it would tend to give the woman's vote too narrow and one-sided a character. To grant women the right to vote is a different matter from granting women the right to enter a profession. In order to give women the right to be doctors or lawyers it is not necessary that women generally should be convinced of the advantage of such a step. The matter chiefly concerns the very small number of women who desire the privilege. But the women who vote will be in some measure legislating for women generally, and it is therefore necessary that women generally should participate.

But even if it is admitted—although, as we have seen, there is a twofold reason for not making such an admission—that the suffragettes are justified in regarding politicians as the obstacles in the way of their demands, there still remains the question of the disadvantage of their method. This method is by some euphemistically described as the introduction of "nagging" into politics; but even at this mild estimate of its character the question may still be asked whether the method is calculated to attain the desired end. One hears women suffragettes declare that this is the only kind of argument men understand. There is, however, in the masculine mind—and by no means least when it is British—an element which strongly objects to be worried and bullied even into a good course of action. The suffragettes have done their best to stimulate that element of obstinacy. Even among men who viewed the matter from an unprejudiced standpoint many felt that, necessary as woman's suffrage is, the policy of the suffragettes rendered the moment unfavourable for its adoption. It is a significant fact that in the countries which have so far granted women the franchise no methods in the slightest degree resembling those of the suffragettes have ever been practised. It is not easy to imagine Australia tolerating such methods, and in Finland full Parliamentary rights were freely granted, as is generally recognized, precisely as a mark of gratitude for women's helpfulness in standing side by side with their men in a great political struggle. The policy of obstruction adopted by the English suffragettes, with its "tactics" of opposing at election times the candidates of the very party whose leaders they are imploring to grant them the franchise, was so foolish that it is little wonder that many doubted whether women at all understand the methods of politics, or are yet fitted to take a responsible part in political life.

The suffragette method of persuading public men seems to be, on the whole, futile, even if it were directed at the proper quarter, and even if it were in itself a justifiable method. But it would be possible to grant these "ifs" and still to feel that a serious injury is done to the cause of woman's suffrage when the method of violence is adopted by women. Some suffragettes have argued, in this matter, that in political crises men also have acted just as badly or worse. But, even if we assume that this is the case,[57] it has been one of the chief arguments hitherto for the admission of women into political life that they exercise an elevating and refining influence, so that their entrance into this field will serve to purify politics. That, no doubt, is an argument mostly brought forward by men, and may be regarded as, in some measure, an amiable masculine delusion, since most of the refining and elevating elements in civilization probably owe their origin not to women but to men. But it is not altogether a delusion. In the virtues of force—however humbly those virtues are to be classed—women, as a sex, can never be the rivals of men, and when women attempt to gain their ends by the demonstration of brute force they can only place themselves at a disadvantage. They are laying down the weapons they know best how to use, and adopting weapons so unsuitable that they only injure the users.

Many women, speaking on behalf of the suffragettes, protest against the idea that women must always be "charming." And if "charm" is to be understood in so narrow and conventionalized a sense that it means something which is incompatible with the developed natural activities, whether of the soul or of the body, then such a protest is amply justified. But in the larger sense, "charm"—which means the power to effect work without employing brute force—is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm. And the justification for women in this matter is that herein they represent the progress of civilization. All civilization involves the substitution in this respect of the woman's method for the man's. In the last resort a savage can only assert his rights by brute force. But with the growth of civilization the wronged man, instead of knocking down his opponent, employs "charm"; in other words he engages an advocate, who, by the exercise of sweet reasonableness, persuades twelve men in a box that his wrongs must be righted, and the matter is then finally settled, not by man's weapon, the fist, but by woman's weapon, the tongue. Nowadays the same method of "charm" is being substituted for brute force in international wrongs, and with the complete substitution of arbitration for war the woman's method of charm will have replaced the man's method of brute force along the whole line of legitimate human activity. If we realize this we can understand why it is that a group of women who, even in the effort to support a good cause, revert to the crude method of violence are committing a double wrong. They are wronging their own sex by proving false to its best traditions, and they are wronging civilization by attempting to revive methods of savagery which it is civilization's mission to repress. Therefore it may fairly be held that even if the methods of the suffragettes were really adequate to secure women's suffrage, the attainment of the franchise by those methods would be a misfortune. The ultimate loss would be greater than the gain.

If we hold the foregoing considerations in mind it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that neither in their direction nor in their nature are the methods of the suffragettes fitted to attain the end desired. We have still, however, to consider the other side of the question.

Whenever an old movement receives a strong infusion of new blood, whatever excesses or mistakes may arise, it is very unlikely that all the results will be on the same side. It is certainly not so in this case. Even the opposition to woman's suffrage which the suffragettes are responsible for, and the Anti-Suffrage societies which they have called into active existence, are not an unmitigated disadvantage. Every movement of progress requires a vigorous movement of opposition to stimulate its progress, and the clash of discussion can only be beneficial in the end to the progressive cause.

But the immense advantage of the activity of the suffragettes has been indirect. It has enabled the great mass of ordinary sensible women who neither join Suffrage societies nor Anti-Suffrage societies to think for themselves on this question. Until a few years ago, while most educated women were vaguely aware of the existence of a movement for giving women the vote, they only knew of it as something rather unpractical and remote; its reality had never been brought home to them. When women witnessed the eruption into the streets of a band of women—most of them apparently women much like themselves—who were so convinced that the franchise must be granted to women, here and now, that they were prepared to face publicity, ridicule, and even imprisonment, then "votes for women" became to them, for the first time, a real and living issue. In a great many cases, certainly, they realized that they intensely disliked the people who behaved in this way and any cause that was so preached. But in a great many other cases they realized, for the first time definitely, that the demand of votes for women was a reasonable demand, and that they were themselves suffragists, though they had no wish to take an active part in the movement, and no real sympathy with its more "militant" methods. There can be no doubt that in this way the suffragettes have performed an immense service for the cause of women's suffrage. It has been for the most part an indirect and undesigned service, but in the end it will perhaps more than serve to counterbalance the disadvantages attached to their more conscious methods and their more deliberate aims.

If, as we may trust, this service will be the main outcome of the suffragette phase of the women's movement, it is an outcome to be thankful for; we may then remember with gratitude the ardent enthusiasm of the suffragettes and forget the foolish and futile ways in which it was manifested. There has never been any doubt as to the ultimate adoption of women's suffrage; its gradual extension among the more progressive countries of the world sufficiently indicates that it will ultimately reach even to the most backward countries. Its accomplishment in England has been gradual, although it is here so long since the first steps were taken, not because there has been some special and malignant opposition to it on the part of men in general and politicians in particular, but simply because England is an old and conservative country, with a very ancient constitutional machinery which effectually guards against the hasty realization of any scheme of reform. This particular reform, however, is not an isolated or independent scheme; it is an essential part of a great movement in the social equalization of the sexes which has been going on for centuries in our civilization, a movement such as may be correspondingly traced in the later stages of the civilizations of antiquity. Such a movement we may by our efforts help forward, we may for a while retard, but it is a part of civilization, and it would be idle to imagine that we can affect the ultimate issue.

That the issue of women's suffrage may be reached in England within a reasonable period is much to be desired for the sake of the woman's movement in the larger sense, which has nothing to do with politics, and is now impeded by this struggle. The enfranchisement of women, Miss Frances Cobbe declared thirty years ago, is "the crown and completion" of all progress in women's movement. "Votes for women," exclaims, more youthfully but not less unreasonably, Miss Christabel Pankhurst, "means a new Heaven and a new Earth." But women's suffrage no more means a new Heaven or even a new Earth than it means, as other people fear, a new Purgatory and a new Hell. We may see this quite plainly in Australasia. Women's votes aid in furthering social legislation and contribute to the passing of acts which have their good side, and, no doubt, like everything else, their bad side. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who devoted her life to the political enfranchisement of women, declared, the ballot is, at most, only the vestibule to women's emancipation. Man's suffrage has not introduced the millennium, and it is foolish to suppose that woman's suffrage can. It is merely an act of justice and a reasonable condition of social hygiene.

The attainment of the suffrage, if it is a beginning and not an end, will thus have a real and positive value in liberating the woman's movement from a narrow and sterilizing phase of its course. In England, especially, the woman's movement has in the past largely confined itself to imitating men and to obtaining the same work and the same rights as men. Putting the matter more broadly, it may be said that it has been the aim of the woman's movement to secure woman's claims as a human being rather than as woman. But that is only half the task of the woman's movement, and perhaps not the most essential half. Women can never be like men, any more than men can be like women. It is their unlikeness which renders them indispensable to each other, and which also makes it imperative that each sex should have its due share in moulding the conditions of life. Woman's function in life can never be the same as man's, if only because women are the mothers of the race. That is the point, the only point, at which women have an uncontested supremacy over men. The most vital problem before our civilization to-day is the problem of motherhood, the question of creating the human beings best fitted for modern life, the practical realization of a sound eugenics. Manouvrier, the distinguished anthropologist, who carries feminism to its extreme point in the scientific sphere, yet recognizes the fundamental fact that "a woman's part is to make children." But he clearly perceives also that "in all its extent and all its consequences that part is not surpassed in importance, in difficulty, or in dignity, by the man's part." On the contrary it is a part which needs "an amount of intelligence incontestably superior, and by far, to that required by most masculine occupations."[58] We are here at the core of the woman's movement. And the full fruition of that movement means that women, by virtue of their supremacy in this matter, shall take their proper share in legislation for life, not as mere sexless human beings, but as women, and in accordance with the essential laws of their own nature as women.

II

There is a further question. Is it possible to discern the actual embodiment of this new phase of the woman movement? I think it is.

To those who are accustomed to watch the emotional pulse of mankind, nothing has seemed so remarkable during recent years as the eruption of sex questions in Germany. We had always been given to understand that the sphere of women and the laws of marriage had been definitely prescribed and fixed in Germany for at least two thousand years, since the days of Tacitus, in fact, and with the best possible results. Germans assured the world in stentorian tones that only in Germany could young womanhood be seen in all its purity, and that in the German Hausfrau the supreme ideal had been reached, the woman whose great mission is to keep alive the perennial fire of the ancient German hearth. Here and there, indeed, the quiet voice of science was heard in Germany; thus Schrader, the distinguished investigator of Teutonic origins, in commenting on the oft-quoted testimony of Tacitus to the chastity of the German women, has appositely referred to the detailed evidences furnished by the Committee of pastors of the Evangelical Church as to the extreme prevalence of unchastity among the women of rural Germany, and argued that these widespread customs must be very ancient and deep-rooted.[59] But Germans in general refused to admit that Tacitus had only used the idea of German virtue as a stick to beat his own fellow-countrywomen with.

The Social-Democratic movement, which has so largely overspread industrial and even intellectual Germany, prepared the way for a less traditional and idealistic way of feeling in regard to these questions. The publication by Bebel of a book, Die Frau, in which the leader of the German Social-Democratic party set forth the Socialist doctrine of the position of women in society, marked the first stage in the new movement. This book exercised a wide influence, more especially on uncritical readers. It is, indeed, from a scientific point of view a worthless book—if a book in which genuine emotions are brought to the cause of human freedom and social righteousness may ever be so termed—but it struck a rude blow at the traditions of Teutonic sentiment. With something of the rough tone and temper of the great peasant who initiated the German Reformation, a man who had himself sprung from the people, and who knew of what he was speaking, here set down in downright fashion the actual facts as to the position of women in Germany, as well as what he conceived to be the claims of justice in regard to that position, slashing with equal vigour alike at the absurdities of conventional marriage and of prostitution, the obverse and the reverse, he declared, of a false society. The emotional renaissance with which we are here concerned seems to have no special and certainly no exclusive association with the Social-Democratic movement, but it can scarcely be doubted that the permeation of a great mass of the German people by the socialistic conceptions which in their bearing on women have been rendered so familiar by Bebel's exposition has furnished, as it were, a ready-made sounding-board which has given resonance and effect to voices which might otherwise have been quickly lost in vacuity.

There is another movement which counts for something in the renaissance we are here concerned with, though for considerably less than one might be led to expect. What is specifically known as the "woman's rights' movement" is in no degree native to Germany, though Hippel is one of the pioneers of the woman's movement, and it is only within recent years that it has reached Germany. It is alien to the Teutonic feminine mind, because in Germany the spheres of men and women are so far apart and so unlike that the ideal of imitating men fails to present itself to a German woman's mind. The delay, moreover, in the arrival of the woman's movement in Germany had given time for a clearer view of that movement and a criticism of its defects to form even in the lands of its origin, so that the German woman can no longer be caught unawares by the cry for woman's rights. Still, however qualified a view might be taken of its benefits, it had to be recognized, even in Germany, that it was an inevitable movement, and to some extent at all events indispensable from the woman's point of view. The same right to education as men, the same rights of public meeting and discussion, the same liberty to enter the liberal professions, these are claims which during recent years have been widely made by German women and to some extent secured, while—as is even more significant—they are for the most part no longer very energetically disputed. The International Congress of Women which met in Berlin in 1904 was a revelation to the citizens of Berlin of the skill and dignity with which women could organize a congress and conduct business meetings. It was notable, moreover, in that, though under the auspices of an International Council, it showed the large number of German women who are already entitled to take a leading part in the movements for women's welfare. Both directly and indirectly, indeed, such a movement cannot be otherwise than specially beneficial in Germany. The Teutonic reverence for woman, the assertion of the "aliquid divinum," has sometimes been accompanied by the openly expressed conviction that she is a fool. Outside Germany it would not be easy to find the representative philosophers of a nation putting forward so contemptuous a view of women as is set forth by Schopenhauer or by Nietzsche, while even within recent years a German physician of some ability, the late Dr. Moebius, published a book on the "physiological weak-mindedness of women."

The new feminine movement in Germany has received highly important support from the recent development of German science. The German intellect, exceedingly comprehensive in its outlook, ploddingly thorough, and imperturbably serious, has always taken the leading and pioneering part in the investigation of sexual problems, whether from the standpoint of history, biology, or pathology. Early in the nineteenth century, when even more courage and resolution were needed to face the scientific study of such questions than is now the case, German physicians, unsupported by any co-operation in other countries, were the pioneers in exploring the paths of sexual pathology.[60] From the antiquarian side, Bachofen, more than half a century ago, put forth his conception of the exalted position of the primitive mother which, although it has been considerably battered by subsequent research, has been by no means without its value, and is of special significance from the present standpoint, because it sprang from precisely the same view of life as that animating the German women who are to-day inaugurating the movement we are here concerned with. From the medical side the late Professor Krafft-Ebing of Vienna and Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin are recognized throughout the world as leading authorities on sexual pathology, and in recent times many other German physicians of the first authority can be named in this field; while in Austria Dr. F.S. Krauss and his coadjutors in the annual volumes of Anthropophyteia are diligently exploring the rich and fruitful field of sexual folk-lore. The large volumes of the Jahrbuch fuer Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, edited by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, have presented discussions of the commonest of sexual aberrations with a scientific and scholarly thoroughness, a practical competence, as well as admirable tone, which we may seek in vain in other countries. In Vienna, moreover, Professor Freud, with his bold and original views on the sexual causation of many abnormal mental and nervous conditions, and his psycho-analytic method of investigating and treating them, although his doctrines are by no means universally accepted, is yet exerting a revolutionary influence all over the world. During the last ten years, indeed, the amount of German scientific and semi-scientific literature, dealing with every aspect of the sexual question, and from every point of view, is altogether unparalleled. It need scarcely be said that much of this literature is superficial or worthless. But much of it is sound, and it would seem that on the whole it is this portion of it which is most popular. Thus Dr. August Forel, formerly professor of psychiatry at Zurich and a physician of world-wide reputation, published a few years ago at Munich a book on the sexual question, Die Sexuelle Frage, in which all the questions of the sexual life, biological, medical, and social, are seriously discussed with no undue appeal to an ignorant public; it had an immediate success and a large sale. Dr. Forel had not entered this field before; he had merely come to the conclusion that every man at the end of his life ought to set forth his observations and conclusions regarding the most vital of questions. Again, at about the same time, Dr. Iwan Bloch, of Berlin, published his many-sided work on the sexual life of our time, Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit, a work less remarkable than Forel's for the weight of the personal authority expressed, but more remarkable by the range of its learning and the sympathetic attitude it displayed towards the best movements of the day; this book also met with great success.[61] Still more recently (1912) Dr. Albert Moll, with characteristic scientific thoroughness, has edited, and largely himself written, a truly encyclopaedic Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften. The eminence of the writers of these books and the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific quality, but by the existence of a journal like Sexual-Probleme, edited by Dr. Max Marcuse, a journal with many distinguished contributors, and undoubtedly the best periodical in this field to be found in any language.