"Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman, turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was employed—these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of feminine capacities, nature and environment.

"The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had become a butcher, 'Go thou and do likewise,' and an American young lady working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic phenomena.

"In our programme of civilization, we must start out with the conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman, and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother.

"I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively.

"From this general, not from the individual, standpoint, I am trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.

"But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it the completed man—the superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day."



CHAPTER IV

THE LAW OF CONSERVATION

Students of the physical sciences discovered in the nineteenth century a universal law of Nature, always believed by the wisest since the time of Thales, but never before proven, which is now commonly known as the law of the conservation of energy. When we say to a child, "You cannot eat your cake and have it," we are expressing the law of the conservation of matter, which is really a more or less accurate part-expression of the law of the conservation of energy. The law that from nothing nothing is made—and further, though here this concerns us less, that nothing is ever destroyed—is the only firm foundation for any work or any theory whether in science or philosophy. The chemist who otherwise bases his account of a reaction is wrong; the sociologist who denies it Nature will deny. It was the sure foundation upon which Herbert Spencer erected the philosophy of evolution; and every page of this book depends upon the certainty that this law applies to woman and to womanhood as it does to the rest of the universe. Further, it may be shown that certain less universal but most important generalizations made by two or three biologists are indeed special cases of the universal law. There is, first, the law of Herbert Spencer, which states that for every individual there is an inevitable issue between the demands of parenthood and the demands of self; and there is, secondly, the law of Professors Geddes and Thomson, which asserts that this issue specially concerns the female as compared with the male sex, the distinguishing character of femaleness being that in it a higher proportion of the vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore, necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual. It is of service to one's thinking, perhaps, to regard Geddes and Thomson's law as a special case of Spencer's, and Spencer's as a special case of the law of the conservation of energy. First, then, somewhat of detail regarding the law of balance between expenditure on the self and expenditure upon the race; and then to the all-important application of this to the case of womanhood—for upon this application the whole of the subsequent argument depends.

When he set forth, with great daring, to write the "Principles of Biology," Spencer was already at an advantage compared with the accepted writers upon the subject, not merely because of his stupendous intellectual endowment, but also because the idea of the conservation of energy was a permanent guiding factor in all his thought. Thus it was, one supposes, that this bold young amateur, for he was little more, perceived in the light of the evolutionary idea of which he was one of the original promulgators, a simple truth which had been unperceived by all previous writers upon biology, from Aristotle onwards. It is in the last section of his book that Spencer propounds his "law of multiplication," depending upon what he calls the "antagonism between individuation and genesis." As I have observed elsewhere, the word antagonism is perhaps too harsh, and may certainly be misleading, for it may induce us to suppose that there is no possible reconciliation of the claims and demands of the race and the individual, the future and the present. I believe most devoutly that there is such a reconciliation, as indeed Spencer himself pointed out, and a central thesis of this book is indeed that in the right expression of motherhood or foster-motherhood, woman may and increasingly will achieve the highest, happiest, and richest self-development. Thus one may be inclined to abandon the word antagonism, and to say merely that there is a necessary inverse ratio between "individuation" and "genesis," to use the original Spencerian terms. This principle has immense consequences—most notably that as life ascends the birth-rate falls, more of the vital energy being used for the enrichment and development of the individual life, and less for mere physical parenthood. We shall argue that, in the case of mankind, and pre-eminently in the case of woman, this enrichment and development of the individual life is best and most surely attained by parenthood or foster-parenthood, made self-conscious and provident, and magnificently transmuted by its extension and amplification upon the psychical plane in the education of children and, indeed, the care and ennoblement of human life in all its stages.

This law of Spencer's has been discussed at length by the present writer in a previous volume,[2] and we may therefore now proceed to its notable illustration in the case of womanhood and the female sex in general, as made by Geddes and Thomson now more than twenty years ago. It is surprising that the distinguished authors do not seem to have recognized that their law is a special case of Spencer's; but one of them granted this relation in a discussion upon the present writer's first eugenic lecture to the Sociological Society.[3]

We must therefore now briefly but adequately consider the argument of the remarkable book published by the Scottish biologists in 1889, and presented in a new edition in 1900. The latter date is of interest, because it coincides with the re-discovery of the work of Mendel, published in 1865, to which we must afterwards more than once refer; and the work of the Mendelians during the subsequent decade very substantially modifies much of the authors' teaching upon the determination of sex, and the intimate nature of the physiological differences between the sexes. We have learnt more about the nature of sex in the decade or so since the publication of the new edition of the "Evolution of Sex" than in all preceding time. Such, at least, is the well-grounded opinion of all who have acquainted themselves with the work of the Mendelians, as we shall see: and therefore that book is by no means commended to the reader's attention as the last word upon the subject. The rather would one particularly direct him to the following prophetic and admirable passage in the preface of 1900:—

"Our hope is that the growing strength of the still young school of experimental evolutionists may before many years yield results which will involve not merely a revision, but a recasting of our book."

—a passage which may well content the authors to-day, when its fulfilment is so signal.

Yet assuredly the main thesis of the volume stands, and profoundly concerns every student of womanhood in any of its aspects. It will continue to stand when the brilliant foolishness of such writers as poor Weininger, the author of that evidently insane product "Sex and Character," is rightly estimated as interesting to the student of mental pathology alone. There has lately been a kind of epidemic citation from Weininger, whose book is obviously rich in characters that make it attractive to the ignorant and the many; and it is high time that we should concern ourselves less with the product of a suicidal and much-to-be-pitied boy, and more with the sober and scientific work for which daily verification is always at hand.

We cannot do better than have before us at the outset the authors' statement of their main proposition, in the preface to the new edition of their work:—

"In all living creatures there are two great lines of variation, primarily determined by the very nature of protoplasmic change (metabolism); for the ratio of the constructive (anabolic) changes to the disruptive (katabolic) ones, that is of income to outlay, of gains to losses, is a variable one. In one sex, the female, the balance of debtor and creditor is the more favourable one; the anabolic processes tend to preponderate, and this profit may be at first devoted to growth, but later towards offspring, of which she hence can afford to bear the larger share. To put it more precisely, the life-ratio of anabolic to katabolic changes, A/K, in the female is normally greater than the corresponding life-ratio, a/k, in the male. This for us, is the fundamental, the physiological, the constitutional difference between the sexes; and it becomes expressed from the very outset in the contrast between their essential reproductive elements, and may be traced on into the more superficial sexual characters."

A little further on (p. 17), the authors say:—

"Without multiplying instances, a review of the animal kingdom, or a perusal of Darwin's pages, will amply confirm the conclusion that on an average the females incline to passivity, the males to activity. In higher animals, it is true that the contrast shows itself rather in many little ways than in any one striking difference of habit, but even in the human species the difference is recognized. Every one will admit that strenuous spasmodic bursts of activity characterize men, especially in youth, and among the less civilized races; while patient continuance, with less violent expenditure of energy, is as generally associated with the work of women."

We must shortly proceed to study the origin and determination of sex, and more especially of femaleness, in the individual, and here we shall be entirely concerned with the new knowledge commonly called Mendelism, to which there is no allusion in our authors' pages. Meanwhile it must be insisted that the reader who will either read their pages for a survey of the evidence in detail, or who will for a moment consider the evident necessities imposed by the facts of parenthood, cannot possibly fail to satisfy himself that the main contention, as stated in the foregoing quotations, is correct. A further point of the greatest importance to us requires to be made.

It is that, owing to profound but intelligible causes, the contrast which necessarily obtains between the sexes in respect of their vital expenditure is most marked in the case of our own species. It is one of the conditions of progress that the young of the higher species make more demands upon their mothers than do the young of humbler forms. In other words, progress in the world of life has always leant upon and been conditioned by motherhood. Thus, as one has so frequently asserted in reference to the modern campaign against infant mortality, the young of the human species are nurtured within the sacred person—the therefore sacred person—of the mother for a longer period in proportion to the body weight than in the case of any other species; and the natural period of maternal feeding is also the longest known. On the other hand, the physical demands made by parenthood upon the male sex are no greater in our case than in that of lower forms; though upon the psychical plane the great fact of increasing paternal care in the right line of progress may never be forgotten. But thus it follows that the law of conservation, asserting that what is spent for self cannot be kept for the race, and that if the demands of the future are to be met the present must be subordinated, not merely applies to woman, but applies to her in unique degree. There are grounds, also, for believing that what is demonstrably and obviously true on the physical plane has its counterpart in the psychical plane; and that, if woman is to remain distinctively woman in mind, character, and temperament, and if, just because she remains or becomes what she was meant to be, she is to find her greatest happiness, she must orient her life towards Life Orient, towards the future and the life of this world to come. Some such doctrines may help us at a later stage to decide whether it be better that a woman should become a mother or a soldier, a nurse or an executioner.



CHAPTER V

THE DETERMINATION OF SEX

We must regard life as essentially female, since there is no choice but to look upon living forms which have no sex as female, and since we know that in many of the lower forms of life there is possible what is called parthenogenesis or virgin-birth. It has, indeed, been ingeniously argued by a distinguished American writer, Professor Lester Ward,[4] that the male sex is to be looked upon as an afterthought, an ancillary contrivance, devised primarily for the advantages of having a second sex—whatever those advantages may exactly be; and secondarily, one would add, becoming useful in adding fatherhood to motherhood upon the psychical plane of post-natal care and education as well.

But whatever was the historical or evolutionary origin of sex, we may here be excused for attaching more importance—for it is of great practical consequence—to the origin or determination of sex in the individual. At what stage and under what influences did the child that is born a girl become female? To what extent can we control the determination of sex? Why are the numbers of the sexes approximately so equal? What determines the curious disproportions observed in many families, which may be composed only of girls or only of boys; and, as is asserted, also observed after wars and epidemics or during sieges, when an abnormally high proportion of boys is said to be born? These are some of the deeply interesting questions which men have always attempted to answer—with the beginnings of substantial success during the present century at last.

In general it is true that, the more we learn of the characters and histories of living beings, the more importance we attach to nature or birth and the less to nurture or environment, vastly important though the latter be. Thus to the student of heredity nothing could well seem more improbable, at any rate amongst the higher animals, than that characters so profound as those of sex should be determined by nurture. He simply cannot but believe that the sex of the individual is as inborn as his backbone, and as incapable of being created by varying conditions of nurture. The causation of sex is therefore really a problem in heredity; and we may most confidently assert, in the first place, that the sex of every human being is already determined at the moment of conception when, indeed, the new individual is created: determined then by the nature and constitution of the living cells—or of one of them—which combine to form the new being. Subsequent attempts to affect the sex, as by means of the mother's diet and the like, are palpably hopeless from the outset and always will be. This is by no means to say that conditions affecting the mother—as, for instance, the semi-starvation of a prolonged siege—may not affect the construction of the germ-cells which she houses, and which are constantly being formed within her from the mother germ-cells, as they are called. But any given final germ-cell, such as will combine with another from an individual of the opposite sex to form a new being, is already determined, once for all, to be of one sex or the other. We naturally ask, then, how the two parents are concerned in this matter; and the first remarkable answer returned by the Mendelian workers during the last three or four years is that it is the mother who determines the sex of her children in the case of all the higher animals. Her contribution to the new being is called the ovum, and it is believed that ova are of two kinds, or, we are quite right in saying, of two sexes.

Those who are now working at these problems experimentally, actually seeing what happens in given cases, and whom we may for convenience call Mendelians after the master who gave them their method and their key, have latterly obtained results the main tenour of which must be stated here, as they indicate the lines of a portion of the succeeding argument. The task was to attack experimentally the determination of sex—a fascinating problem for which so many solutions that failed to hold water have been found, but hitherto no others. In finding the answer to it, as they appear certainly to have done so far as the higher animals are concerned, the Mendelians are also beginning to ascertain, as we shall see, certain basal facts as to the composition or constitution of the individual; and to us, who wish to know exactly what a woman is, and what she is as distinguished from a man, this discovery is of the most vital importance. The experimental facts are not yet numerous, and if they were not consonant with facts of other orders, it would be rash to proceed; but it will be evident, in the sequel, that common experience is well in accord with the experimental evidence.

It appears that, amongst at any rate the higher animals, the sex of offspring is determined by the nature of the mother's contribution. The cell derived from the father is always male—as goes without saying, we might add, if we knew little of the subject. But the ovum, the cell derived from the mother, may carry either femaleness or maleness. When an ovum bearing maleness meets the invariably maleness-bearing sperm, the resultant individual is a male, of course, and he is male all through. But when an ovum bearing femaleness meets a sperm, the resulting individual is female, femaleness being a Mendelian "dominant" to maleness; if both be present, femaleness appears. The female, however, is not female all through as the male is male all through. So far as sex is concerned, he is made of maleness plus maleness; but she is made of femaleness plus maleness. In Mendelian language the male is homozygous, so-called "pure" as regards this character. But the female is heterozygous, "impure" in the sense that her femaleness depends upon the dominance of the factor for femaleness over the factor for maleness, which also is present in her. In the Mendelian terminology, she is an instance of impure dominance. The observed practical equality in the numbers of the two sexes is in exact accord with this interpretation of the facts, this proportion being the expected and observed one in many other cases which doubtless depend upon parallel conditions of the reproductive cells.

Surely there is great enlightenment here: for the discovery of the factors determining sex is a very small affair compared with the suggestive inference as to the constitution of womanhood. Let us compare man and woman on the basis of this assumption.

In the man there is nothing but maleness. This is not to deny that he may possess the protective instinct and the tender emotion which is its correlate, even though these were undoubtedly feminine in origin. But it is to deny that any injury to, or arrested development of, the male can reveal in him characters distinctively female. He may fail to become a man and may remain a boy; or, having been a man, he may perhaps return, under certain conditions, to a more youthful state; but he will never, can never, display anything distinctive of the woman.

Not such, however, must be the woman's case. If anything should interfere with the development and dominance of the femaleness factor in her, there is not another "dose" of femaleness, so to speak, to fall back upon; but a dose of maleness. We may be right in thus seeking to explain certain familiar phenomena, observed in women under various conditions—as, for instance, the growth of hair upon the face in elderly women, the assumption of a masculine voice and aspect, and so forth. Such facts are frequently to be observed after the climacteric or "change of life," which probably denotes the termination of the dominance of the femaleness factor. They are also to be observed as a consequence of operations much more commonly and irresponsibly performed a few years ago than now, which abruptly deprived the organism of the internal secretion through which, as we may surmise, the femaleness factor in the germ makes its presence effective.

If these propositions are valid, they are certainly important. Our attitude towards them will depend upon our estimates of the worth of distinctive womanhood. We may regard it as a loss to society that what might have been a woman should become only a sort of man of rather less than average efficiency. Or we may hail with delight the possibility that, after all, we may be able, by judicious education, to make men of our daughters. But, whatever our estimates, certainly it is of great interest to inquire how far and in what directions education may affect the development of what was given in the germ. We cannot yet answer this question. In a thousand matters it is all-important to know in what degree education can control nature, but until we know what the nature of the individual is we cannot decide. Professor Bateson has clearly shown that we shall be able duly to estimate environment only when Mendelian analysis has gone much further, and has instructed us in detail as to the nature of the material upon which environment is to act.

For instance, there is the well-established fact that women who have undergone "higher education" show a low marriage-rate, and produce very few children. However considered, the fact is of great importance. But the right interpretation of it is not certain. There are women of a type approaching the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these women, already predestined for something other than distinctive womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words, is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation, we shall certainly do grave injury to individuals and society.

Thus, we might roundly condemn the higher education of women in toto, and hold up the "domestic woman" as the sole type to which every woman can and must be made to conform. Or, on the other hand, we may argue that it is well to provide suitable opportunities of self-development for those women whose nature practically unfits them for the ordinary career of a woman.

I do not think that any one who has had opportunities of first-hand observation will question the presence in university and college class-rooms of girls of the anomalous type. Each generation produces a certain number of such. Probably no education will alter their nature in any radical or effective way. On every ground, personal and social, we must be right in providing for them, as for their brothers, all the opportunities they may desire. But I am convinced that their relative number is not large.

The great majority of those girls who are nowadays subjected to what we call "higher education" are of the normal type; and this is none the less true because the proportion of the anomalous is doubtless higher here than in the feminine community at large. The ordinary observation of those teachers who year by year see young girls at the beginning of their higher education will certainly confirm the statement that by far the greater number of them are of the ordinary feminine type. If this be so, the necessary inference is that education has a potent influence, and that it must be held accountable for the observed facts of later years, whether those facts please or displease us.

The human being is the most adaptable—that is to say, educable—of all living creatures. This is true of women as well as men. The response of girls to ideas, ideals, suggestion, the spirit of the group, is an unquestioned thing. Further, there are basal facts of physiology, ultimately dependent on the law of the conservation of energy, and the circumstance that you cannot eat your cake and have it, which work hand-in-hand, on their own effective plane, with the psychological influences already referred to. All physiology and psychology lead us to expect those results of "higher education" upon its subjects or victims which, in fact, we find, and which, in the main, are indeed its results and not dependent upon the exceptional natures of those subjected to it. The more general higher education becomes, and the less selection is exercised upon the candidates for it, the more evident, I believe, will it appear that woman responds in high degree to the total circumstances of her life; and that if we do not like the fruits of our labour it is we indeed that are to blame.



CHAPTER VI

MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD

We are accustomed to think of Mendelism as simply a theory of heredity, by which term we should properly understand the relation between living generations. Now Mendelism is certainly this, but I believe that it is vastly more. Already the claim has been made, though not, perhaps, in adequate measure, by the Mendelians, and I am convinced that their title to it will be upheld. Mendelism has already effected a really epoch-making advance in our knowledge of heredity—the relations between parents and offspring; but we shall learn ere long that it has yet more to teach us regarding the very constitution of living beings. As modern chemistry can analyse a highly complex molecule into its constituent elementary atoms, so the Mendelians promise ere long to enable us to effect an organic analysis of living creatures. For many decades past theory has perceived that, in the germ-cells whence we and the higher animals and plants are developed, there must exist—somewhere intermediate between the chemical molecule and the vital unit, the cell itself—units which Herbert Spencer, the first and greatest of their students, called physiological or constitutional units. Since his day they have been re-discovered—or rather re-named—by a host of students, including Haeckel, Weismann, and many of scarcely less distinction. The Mendelian "factors," as I maintain must be clear to any student of the idea, are Spencer's physiological units. Of course neither Spencer nor any one else, until the re-discovery of Mendel's work, had any notion at all of the remarkable fashion in which these units are treated in the process whereby germ-cells are prepared for their great destiny. The rule, as we now know, is that one germ-cell contains any given unit, while another does not. The process of cell-division, whereby the germ-cells or gametes[5] are made, is called gameto-genesis. Somewhere in its course there occurs the capital fact discovered by Mendel and called by him segregation. A cell divides into two—which are the final gametes. One of these will definitely contain the Mendelian factor, and the other will be as definitely without it. Definite consequences follow in the constitution of the offspring; and such is the Mendelian contribution to heredity. But we must see that these inquiries cannot be far pursued without telling us vastly more than we ever knew before of not only the relation between individuals of successive generations, but the very structure of the individuals themselves. It is by the study of heredity that we shall learn to understand the individual. For instance, experimental breeding of the fowl reveals the existence of the brooding instinct as a definite unit, which enters, or does not enter, into the composition of the individual, and which is quite distinct from the capacity to produce eggs. Here is a definite distinction suggested, for the case of the fowl, between two really distinct things which, for several years past, I have called respectively physical and psychical motherhood. The analysis will doubtless go far further, but already the facts of experiment help us to realize the composition of the individual mother—for instance, the number of possible variants, and the non-necessity of a connection between the capacity to produce children and the parental instinct upon which the care of them depends, and without which entire and perfect motherhood cannot be.

The Mendelians are teaching us, too, that their "factors," the units of which we are made, are often intertangled or mutually repellent. If such-and-such goes into the germ-cell, so must something else; or if the one, then never the other. There may thus be naturally determined conditions of entire womanhood; just as one may be externally a woman, yet lack certain of the fractional constituents which are necessary for the perfect being. Complete womanhood, like genius—rarer though not more valuable—depends upon the co-existence of many factors, some of which may be coupled and segregated together in gameto-genesis, while others may be quite independent, only chance determining the throw of them. And the question of incompatibility or mutual repulsion of factors is of the gravest concern; as, for instance, if it were the case—and the illustration is perhaps none too far-fetched—that the factor for the brooding instinct and the factor for intellect can scarcely be allotted together to a single cell.

This question of compatibilities is illustrated very strikingly by the case of the worker-bee. There is as yet no purely Mendelian interpretation of this case, Mendel's own laborious work upon heredity in bees having been entirely lost, and practically nothing having been done since. Yet, as will be evident, the main argument of Geddes and Thomson leads us to a similar interpretation of this case in terms of compatibility.

The worker-bee is an individual of a most remarkable and admirable kind, from whom mankind have yet a thousand truths to learn. She is distinguished primarily by the rare and high development of her nervous apparatus. In terms of brain and mind, using these words in a general sense, the worker-bee is almost the paragon of animals. The ancients supposed that the queen-bee was indeed the queen and ruler of the hive. Here, they thought, was the organizing genius, the forethought, the exquisite skill in little things and great, upon which the welfare of the hive and the future of the race depend. But, in point of fact, the queen-bee is a fool. Her brain and mind are of the humblest order. She never organizes anything, and does not rule even herself, but does what she is told. She is entirely specialized for motherhood; but the thinking, and the determination of the conditions of her motherhood, are in the hands of other females, also highly specialized, and certainly the least selfish of living things—yet themselves sterile, incapable of motherhood.

Observe, further, that these wonderful workers, so highly endowed in terms of brain, are amongst the children of the queen, herself a fool; and that it was the conditions of nourishment, the conditions of environment or education, which determined whether the young creatures should develop into queens or workers, fertile fools or sterile wits. We have here an absolute demonstration that environment or nurture can determine the production of these two antithetic and radically opposed types of femaleness.

Now, amongst the bees, this high degree of specialization works very well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate, that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third sex. Further, we know that nurture alone accounts for this remarkable splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties.

I have little doubt that a process which is, at the very least, analogous, is possible amongst ourselves; nay more, that such a process is already afoot. In Japan they have actually been talking of a deliberate differentiation between workers and breeders; such differentiation, though indeliberate, is to be seen to-day in all highly civilized communities. Is it likely to be as good for us as for the bee-hive? And, granted its value as a social structure, is it, even then, to be worth while?

No one can answer these questions, though I venture to believe that it is something to ask them. So far as the last is concerned, we must not admit the smallest infringement of the supreme principles that every human being is an end in himself or herself, and that the worth of a society is to be found in the worth and happiness of the individuals who compose it.

Can we, as human beings, regard a human society as admirable because it is successful, stable, numerous?

The question is a fundamental one, for it matters at what we aim. As it becomes increasingly possible for man to realize his ideals, it becomes increasingly important that they shall be right ones; and there is a risk to-day that the growth of knowledge shall be too rapid for wisdom to keep pace with. We are reaching towards, and will soon attain in very large and effective measure, nothing less than a control of life, present and to come. It may well be that a remodelling of human society upon the lines of the bee-hive is feasible. It was his study of bees that made a Socialist of Professor Forel, certainly one of the greatest of living thinkers; and his assumption is that in the bee-hive we have an example largely worthy of imitation. But he would be the first to admit that, as the ordinary Socialist has yet to learn, the nature of the society is ultimately determined by the nature of the individuals composing it. It follows that the bee-society can be completely, or, at all events substantially, imitated only by remodelling human nature on the lines of the individual bee. This is very far from impossible; there is a plethora of human drones already, and we see the emergence of the sterile female worker. But is such a change—or any change at all of that kind—to be desired?

The Terms of Specialization.—It surely cannot be denied that there may be a grave antagonism between the interests of the society and those of the individual. It is a question of the terms of specialization or differentiation. In the study of the individual organism and its history we discern specialization of the cell as a capital fact. Organic evolution has largely depended upon what Milne-Edwards called the "physiological division of labour." In so far as organic evolution has been progressive, it has entirely coincided with this process of cell-differentiation. That is the clear lesson which the student of progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which human society presents.

For this primary and physiological division of labour has its analogue in a much later thing, the division of labour in human society, upon which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends. And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the "number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.

How far we are entitled to go we shall determine only when we know what it is that we want to attain.

If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in their making. In general, the professional must do better than the amateur; the lover of chamber music knows that a Joachim or Brussels Quartet is not to be found everywhere. Specialization we must have for progress, or even for the maintenance of what the past has achieved for us; but we shall pay the right price only by remembering the principle that all progress in the world of life has depended on cell-differentiation. If we prejudice that we are prejudicing progress.

Now nothing can be more evident than that, in some of our specializations of the individual for the sake of society, we are opposing that specialization within the individual which, it has been laid down, we must never sacrifice. And so we reach the basal principle to which the preceding argument has been guiding us. It is that the specialization of the individual for the sake of society may rightly proceed to any point short of reversing or aborting the process of differentiation within himself. Every individual is an end in himself; there are no other ends for society; and that society is the best which best provides for the most complete development and self-expression of the individuals composing it.

But how, then, is the division of labour necessary for society to be effected, the reader may ask? The answer is that the human species, like all others, displays what biologists call variation—men and women naturally differ within limits so wide that, when we consider the case of genius, we must call them incalculable, illimitable. The difference of our faces or our voices is a mere symbol of differences no less universal but vastly more important. It is these differences, in reality, that are the cause of the development of human society and of that division of labour upon which it depends. In providing for the best development of all these various individuals we at the same time provide for the division of labour that we need; nor can we in any other fashion provide so well. Thus we shall attain a society which, if less certainly stable than that of the bees, is what that is not—progressive, and not merely static; and a society which is worth while, justified by the lives and minds of the individuals composing it.

We are not, then, to make a factitious differentiation of set purpose in the interests of society and to the detriment of individuals. We are not to take a being in whom Nature has differentiated a thousand parts, and, in effect, reduce him, in the interests of others, to one or two constituents and powers, thus nullifying the evolutionary course. But we shall frame a society such as the past never witnessed, and we shall achieve a rate of progress equally without parallel, by consistently regarding society as existing for the individual, and not the individual for society, and by thus realizing to the full his characteristic powers for himself and for society.

In so far as all this is true it is true of woman. It has long been asserted that woman is less variable than man; but the certainty of that statement has lately lost its edge. It is probably untrue. There is no real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than man. She has the same title as he has to those conditions in which her particular characters, whatever they be, shall find their most complete and fruitful development. There is no more a single ideal type of woman than there is a single ideal type of man. It takes all sorts even to make a sex. It has been in the past, and always must be, a piece of gross presumption on man's part to say to woman, "Thus shalt thou be, and no other." Whom Nature has made different, man has no business to make or even to desire similar. The world wants all the powers of all the individuals of either sex. On the other hand, no good can come of the attempt to distort the development of those powers or to seek conformity to any type. Much of the evil of the past has arisen from the limitation of woman to practically one profession. Even should it be incomparably the best, in general, it is by no means necessarily the best, or even good at all, for every individual. Men are to be heard saying, "A woman ought to be a wife and mother." It is, perhaps, the main argument of this book that, for most women, this is the sphere in which their characteristic potencies will find best and most useful expression both for self and others; but that is very different from saying that every woman ought to be a mother, or that no woman ought to be a surgeon. We may prefer the maternal to the surgical type, and there may be good reason for our preference; but the surgeon may be very useful, and, useful or not, the question is not one of ought. Thoughtful people should know better than to make this constant confusion between what ought to be and what is. Let us hold to our ideals, let us by all means have our scale of values; but the first question in such a case as this is as to what is. In point of fact all women are not of the same type; and our expression of what ought to be is none other than the passing of a censure upon Nature for her deeds. We may know better than she, or, as has happened, we may know worse.



VII

BEFORE WOMANHOOD

We have seen that the sex of the individual is already determined as early as any other of his or her characters, though the realization of the potentialities of that sex may be much modified by nurture, as in the contrasted cases of the queen bee and the worker bee. Children, then, are already of one sex or other, and though our business in the present volume is not childhood of either sex, a few points are worth noting before we take up the consideration of the individual at the period when the distinctive characteristics of sex make their effective appearance.

Despite the abundance of the material and the opportunities for observation, we are at present without decisive evidence as to the distinctiveness of sex in any effective way during childhood. Here, as elsewhere, we have to guard ourselves against the influences of nurture in the widest sense of the word; as when, to take an extreme case, we distinguish between the boy and the girl because the hair of the one is cut and of the other is not. The natural, as distinguished from the nurtural, distinctions at this period are probably much fewer than is supposed. It is asserted—to take physical characters first—that the girl of ten gives out in breathing considerably less carbonic acid than her brother of the same age, thus foreshadowing the difference between the sexes which is recognized in later years. If this fact be critically established it is of very great interest, showing that the sex distinction effectively makes its presence felt in the most essential processes of the body. But we should require to be satisfied that the observations were sufficiently numerous, and were made under absolutely equal conditions, and with due allowance for difference in body-weight. They would be the more credible if it were also shown that the number of the red blood corpuscles were smaller in girls than in boys in parallel with the difference between the sexes in later years.

Children of both sexes have fewer red blood corpuscles in a given quantity of blood and a smaller proportion of the red colouring matter, or haemoglobin, than adults. Women have very definitely fewer red blood corpuscles than men, and a smaller proportion of haemoglobin, and their blood is more watery. According to one authority this difference in the haemoglobin can be observed from the ages of eleven to fifty, but not before. The specific gravity of the blood is found to be the same in both sexes before the fifteenth year. Thereafter, that of the boy's blood rises, and between seventeen and forty-five is definitely higher than in women of the corresponding age. It thus seems quite clear that, as we should expect, these differences in the blood, which are certainly, as Dr. Havelock Ellis says, fundamental, make their appearance definitely at puberty—a fact which supports the view that fundamental differences of practical importance between the two sexes before that age are not to be found. Careful comparative study of the pulse of children is hitherto somewhat inconclusive, though it is well known that the pulse is more rapid in women than in men.

On the other hand, it seems clear as regards respiration that as early as the age of twelve there are definite differences between the sexes. Several thousands of American school children were examined, and between the ages of six and nineteen the boys were throughout superior in lung capacity. The girls had almost reached their maximum capacity at the age of twelve, and thereafter the difference, till then slight, rapidly increased.[6] It appears that from eight to fifteen years of age a boy burns more carbon than a girl, the difference, however, being not great. But at puberty the boy proceeds to consume very nearly twice as much carbon per hour as his sister.

Perhaps the matter need not be pursued further. It is sufficient for us to recognize that puberty is really the critical time, and that in the consideration of womanhood we may, on the whole, be justified in looking upon the problem of the girl before that age as almost identical with her brother's. Yet we must be reasonably cautious, since our knowledge is small, and there is some by no means negligible evidence of fundamental physiological differences between the sexes before puberty, relatively slight though these may be. Therefore, though on the whole we need make few distinctions between the girl and her brother, and though we are doubtless wrong in the magnitude of the practical distinctions which we have often made hitherto, yet we must remember that these are going to be different beings, and that the main principles which determine our nurture of womanhood may be recalled when we are doubtful as to practice in the care of the girl child.

Physiological distinctions, we have seen, probably exist during these early years, but are of less importance than we sometimes have attached to them, and of no importance at all compared with what is to come. Psychological distinctions, we may believe, are still more dubious. For instance, it is generally believed that the parental instinct shows itself much more markedly in girls than in boys, and the commonly observed history of the liking for dolls is quoted in this connection. As this instinct bears so profoundly upon the later life of the individual, and as we may reasonably suppose the child to be the mother of the woman as well as the father of the man, the matter is worth looking at a little further.

But, in the first place, it has been asserted that the doll instinct has really nothing whatever to do with the parental instinct in either sex. Psychologists, whom one suspects of being bachelors, tell us that what we really observe here is the instinct of acquisition: it really does not matter what we give the child, though it so happens that we very commonly present it with dolls; it is the lust of possession that we satisfy, and in point of fact one thing will satisfy it as well as another.

The evidence against this view is quite overwhelming. We might quote the universal distribution of dolls in place and in time as revealed by anthropology. Wherever there is mankind there are dolls, whether in Mayfair or in Whitechapel, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Ancient Egypt or Mexico. Further, there is the observed behaviour of the child, opportunities for which have presumably been denied to the psychologists whose opinion has been quoted. The only objection to the theory that the child will be content with the possession of anything else as well as of a doll is the circumstance that the child is not so content, but asks for a doll for choice, and will lavish upon any doll, however diagrammatic, an amount of love and care which no other toy will ever obtain. Further, if the child has opportunities for playing with a real baby, it will be perfectly evident, even to the bachelor psychologist, that the doll was the vicarious substitute for the real thing.

But now, what as to the comparative strength of this instinct in the two sexes? Here we must not be deceived by the effects of nurture, environment, or education. Though finding, as we do, that the little boy enjoys playing with his dolls as his sister does, we refrain from buying dolls for him, and may indeed, underestimating the importance of human fatherhood, declare that dolls are beneath the dignity of a boy though good enough for his sister. He, destined rather for the business of destroying life, so much more glorious than saving it, must learn to play with soldiers. In this fashion we at least deprive ourselves of any opportunity of critically comparing the strength and the history of the instinct in the two sexes.

There is good reason to suppose that the distinction between the psychology of the boy and that of the girl in these early years is very small. If boys are not discouraged they will play with dolls for choice, just as their sisters do, and may be just as charming with younger brothers or sisters. Nor is it by any means certain that this misleading of ourselves is the worst consequence of the common practice. It is possible that we lose opportunities for the inculcation of ideals which are of the highest value to the individual and the race. I am reminded of the true story of a small boy, well brought up, who, being jeered at in the street by bigger boys because he was carrying a doll, turned upon his critics with the admirable retort—slightly wanting in charity, let us hope, but none the less pertinent—"None of you will ever be a good father."

Thus, on the whole, one is inclined to suppose that the general resemblance in facial appearance, bodily contour, and interests which we observe in children of the two sexes, indicates that deeper distinctions are latent rather than active. This is much more than an academic question, for if our subject in the present volume were the care of childhood, it is plain that we should have to base upon our answer to this question our treatment of boy and girl respectively. Probably we are on the whole correct in instituting no deep distinction of any kind in the nurture, either physical or mental, of children during their early years. Nor can there be any doubt, at least so far, as to the rightness of educating them together, and allowing them to compete, in so far as we allow competition at all, freely both in work and in games.

However this may be, there comes at an age which varies somewhat in different races and individuals, a period critical to both sexes, in which the factors of sex differentiation, hitherto more or less latent, begin conspicuously to assert themselves. Here, plainly, is the dawn of womanhood, and here, in our consideration of woman the individual, we must make a start. If we recall the tentative Mendelian analysis already referred to, we may suppose that the "factor" for womanhood begins to assert itself, at any rate in effective degree, at this period of puberty, when a girl becomes a woman; and that its most effective reign is over at the much later crisis which we call the change of life or climacteric. In other words, though sex is determined from the first, and though certain of its distinctive characters remain to the end, we may say that our study of womanhood is practically concerned with the years between twelve or thirteen, and forty-five or fifty. Before this period, as we have suggested, the distinction between the sexes is of no practical importance so far as regimen and education are concerned. After this period also it is probable that the difference between the two sexes is diminished, and would be still more evidently diminished were it not for the effects which different experience has permanently wrought in the memory. We begin our practical study, then, of woman the individual, with the young girl at the age of puberty; and we must concern ourselves first with the care of her body.



VIII

THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS

We shall certainly not reach right conclusions about the physical training of girls unless we rightly understand what physical training does and does not effect, and what we desire it should effect. This applies to all education—that our aim be defined, that we shall know "what it is we are after," and it applies pre-eminently to the education, both physical and mental, of girls.

Now it will be granted, in the first place, that by physical training—whether in the form of gymnastics or games or what not—we desire to produce a healthier and more perfectly developed body. Some will add a stronger body, but as this term has two meanings constantly confused, it really contains the crux of the question. Stronger may mean stronger in the sense of resistance to disease or fatigue or strain of any kind, or it may mean stronger in the sense of the capacity to perform feats of strength. It being commonly assumed that vitality and muscularity are identical, this distinction is, on that assumption, merely academic and trivial. But as muscularity and vitality are not identical, and have indeed very little to do with each other, and as muscularity may even in certain conditions prejudice vitality, the distinction is not academic but all-important. I freely assert that it is substantially ignored by those who concern themselves with physical training, whether of boys or girls or recruits, all the world over.

Though a woman is naturally less muscular than a man, her vitality is higher. This seems to be a general truth of all female organisms. The evidence is of many orders. Thus, to begin with, women live longer, on the average, than men do. In the light of our modern knowledge of alcohol, however, we cannot regard this fact by itself as conclusive, since the average age attained by men is undoubtedly considerably lowered by alcohol, and of course to a much greater extent than obtains in the case of women. But women recover better from poisoning, such as occurs in infectious disease, and they are far more tolerant of loss of blood, as indeed they have to be. The same applies to loss of sleep or food, and to injurious influences generally. These indisputable proofs of superior vitality co-exist with much inferior muscularity, and are conclusive on the point. If men would make observations among themselves and think for a moment, they would soon perceive how foolish they are in crediting the assumptions of the strong men who so successfully persuade the public that the great thing is for a man to have big muscles. Men, muscular by nature, and still more so by nurture, are often in point of fact really weak compared with much less muscular men who, though they cannot put forth so much mechanical energy at a given moment, can yet endure fifty times the fatigue or stress or poisoning of any order. From the point of view of any sound physiology there is no comparison at all between the absurd strong man and the slight Marathon runner of small muscles but splendid vitality. If we are to test vitality in muscular terms at all—that in itself being a quite indefensible assumption—we must do so in terms of endurance, and not in terms of horse power or ass power, at any given moment.

If, then, vitality be our aim in physical training, and not muscularity as such, nor in any degree except in so far as it serves vitality, it is plain that we shall to some extent reconsider our methods.

Pre-eminently will this apply to the girl. Just because she is now becoming a woman, her vital energies are in no small degree pledged for special purposes of the highest importance, from which we cannot possibly divert them if we desire that she shall indeed become a woman. Thus, though muscular exercise of any kind is certainly not to be condemned, we must be cautious; for, in the first place, muscular exercise is no end in itself; in the second, the production of big muscles by exercise is no end in itself; and in the third place, all muscular exercise is expenditure of energy in those outward directions which are not characteristic of womanhood, and which must always be subordinated to those interests that are.

At this period of which we are speaking there are constructions of the most important kind going on in the girl's body, compared with which the construction of additional muscular tissue is of much less than no importance. These building-up processes are, we know, characteristic of the woman. Their right inception is a matter of the greatest importance. They involve the actual accumulation of food material and the building up of it into gland cells and other highly organized tissues upon which complete womanhood depends. These all-important concerns are prejudiced by excessive external expenditure, and thus the care necessary for the boy at puberty is a thousandfold more necessary for the girl, though the obvious changes in her appearance and her voice may be much less marked. Greater and more costly constructions are afoot in her case than her brother's, grossly though these facts are at present ignored in what we are pleased to call education, both physical and mental.

If we are to decide what kinds of physical exercise will be most desirable, we must come to some conclusion as to what is the object of our labours, it being granted that muscular activity and the making of big muscles are not ends in themselves. The answer to this question is to be found in what I have elsewhere called the new asceticism.

In tracing the history of animal progress, we find that it coincides with and has consisted in the emergence of the psychical and its predominance over the physical. The history of progress is the history of the evolving nervous system. Muscles are the servants of the nervous system. In man progress has reached its highest phase in that the nervous system, which at first was merely a servant of the body, has become the essential thing, so that the brain is the man. The old asceticism was at least right in regarding the soul as all-important, though it was utterly wrong in considering the interests of soul and body to be entirely antagonistic, and in teaching that for the elevation of the soul we must outrage, mutilate, and deny the body. The new asceticism accepts the first principle of the old, but bases its practice on a truer conception of the relations between mind and body. The greater part of the body is composed of muscles, and it is with muscles that physical training is concerned. On our principles, then, any system of physical training worth a straw must have primary reference to the brain, since the body, including the muscles, is only the servant of the ego or self which resides in the brain. For this reason, if for no other, the development of muscle as an end in itself is beneath human dignity; the value of a muscle lies not in its size or strength, but in its capacity to be a useful and skilful agent of the brain.

The exceptions to this rule are furnished by precisely those muscles which the usual forms of physical training and gymnastics ignore and subordinate to the development of the muscles of the limbs. It does matter very much that man or woman shall have the heart, which is the most important muscle in the body, and the muscles of respiration in good order. These muscles are directly necessary for life, and are therefore servants of the brain, even though they are not in any appreciable degree the direct agents of its purposes. Any kind of physical exercise then which, while developing the muscles of the arm, for instance, throws undue strain upon the heart or involves the fixation of the chest for a considerable period—as occurs in various feats of strength, whether with weights or upon bars or the like—is ipso facto to be condemned. It is now recognized that in the training of soldiers much harm is often done in this way to the essential muscles, while others, more conspicuous but of relatively no importance, are being developed.

But before we consider in detail what kinds of exercise and with what accompaniment may be permitted for the muscles of the limbs, it is well that we should agree upon some method of deciding as to the quantity of such exercise. We cannot go by such measures as hours per week, for individuals vary. We must find some criterion which will guide us for each individual. The pendulum has swung in this regard from one extreme to another. Both extremes were adopted and permitted because in our guidance of girlhood we ignored facts of physiology, and, notably, because educators had not a clear conception of what it was that they desired to attain. By the consent of all who have given any attention to the subject, the great educational reformer of the nineteenth century was Herbert Spencer, and not the least of his services was his liberation of girls from the extraordinary regimen of fifty years ago. There needs no excuse for a long quotation from the volume in which, just short of half a century ago, Herbert Spencer discussed this matter. Thereafter we may observe how the pendulum has swung to the other extreme:—

"To the importance of bodily exercise most people are in some degree awake. Perhaps less needs saying on this requisite of physical education than on most others; at any rate, in so far as boys are concerned. Public schools and private schools alike furnish tolerably adequate play-grounds; and there is usually a fair share of time for out-door games, and a recognition of them as needful. In this, if in no other direction, it seems admitted that the promptings of boyish instinct may advantageously be followed; and, indeed, in the modern practice of breaking the prolonged morning's and afternoon's lessons by a few minutes' open-air recreation, we see an increasing tendency to conform school-regulations to the bodily sensations of the pupils. Here, then, little need be said in the way of expostulation or suggestion.

"But we have been obliged to qualify this admission by inserting the clause in so far as boys are concerned. Unfortunately, the fact is quite otherwise with girls. It chances, somewhat strangely, that we have daily opportunity of drawing a comparison. We have both a boys' school and a girls' school within view; and the contrast between them is remarkable. In the one case nearly the whole of a large garden is turned into an open, gravelled space, affording ample scope for games, and supplied with poles and horizontal bars for gymnastic exercises. Every day before breakfast, again towards eleven o'clock, again at mid-day, again in the afternoon, and once more after school is over, the neighbourhood is awakened by a chorus of shouts and laughter as the boys rush out to play; and for as long as they remain, both eyes and ears give proof that they are absorbed in that enjoyable activity which makes the pulse bound and ensures the healthful activity of every organ. How unlike is the picture offered by the Establishment for Young Ladies! Until the fact was pointed out, we actually did not know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along the paths with their lesson-books in their hands, or else walking arm-in-arm. Once, indeed, we saw one chase another round the garden; but, with this exception, nothing like vigorous exertion has been visible.

"Why this astonishing difference? Is it that the constitution of a girl differs so entirely from that of a boy as not to need these active exercises? Is it that a girl has none of the promptings to vociferous play by which boys are impelled? Or is it that, while in boys these promptings are to be regarded as stimuli to a bodily activity without which there cannot be adequate development, to their sisters Nature has given them for no purpose whatever—unless it be for the vexation of schoolmistresses? Perhaps, however, we mistake the aim of those who train the gentler sex. We have a vague suspicion that to produce a robust physique is thought undesirable; that rude health and abundant vigour are considered somewhat plebeian; that a certain delicacy, a strength not competent to more than a mile or two's walk, an appetite fastidious and easily satisfied, joined with that timidity which commonly accompanies feebleness, are held more lady-like. We do not expect that any would distinctly avow this; but we fancy the governess-mind is haunted by an ideal young lady bearing not a little resemblance to this type. If so, it must be admitted that the established system is admirably calculated to realize this ideal. But to suppose that such is the ideal of the opposite sex is a profound mistake. That men are not commonly drawn towards masculine women is doubtless true. That such relative weakness as asks the protection of superior strength is an element of attraction we quite admit. But the difference thus responded to by the feelings of men is the natural, pre-established difference, which will assert itself without artificial appliances. And when, by artificial appliances, the degree of this difference is increased, it becomes an element of repulsion rather than of attraction.

"'Then girls should be allowed to run wild—to become as rude as boys, and grow up into romps and hoydens!' exclaims some defender of the proprieties. This, we presume, is the ever-present dread of schoolmistresses. It appears, on inquiry, that at Establishments for Young Ladies noisy play like that daily indulged in by boys is a punishable offence; and we infer that it is forbidden, lest unladylike habits should be formed. The fear is quite groundless, however. For if the sportive activity allowed to boys does not prevent them from growing up into gentlemen, why should a like sportive activity prevent girls from growing up into ladies? Rough as may have been their play-ground frolics, youths who have left school do not indulge in leap-frog in the street, or marbles in the drawing-room. Abandoning their jackets, they abandon at the same time boyish games, and display an anxiety—often a ludicrous anxiety—to avoid whatever is not manly. If now, on arriving at the due age, this feeling of masculine dignity puts so efficient a restraint on the sports of boyhood, will not the feeling of feminine modesty, gradually strengthening as maturity is approached, put an efficient restraint on the like sports of girlhood? Have not women even a greater regard for appearances than men? and will there not consequently arise in them even a stronger check to whatever is rough or boisterous? How absurd is the supposition that the womanly instincts would not assert themselves but for the rigorous discipline of schoolmistresses!

"In this, as in other cases, to remedy the evils of one artificiality, another artificiality has been introduced. The natural, spontaneous exercise having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious exercise—gymnastics. That this is better than nothing we admit, but that it is an adequate substitute for play we deny."

The pendulum has indeed swung across from those days to these of the hockey-girl, not to mention the girl who throws a cricket-ball and bowls very creditably overhand. There can be no doubt that this state of things is vastly better than that was, yet, as one has endeavoured to insist, this also has its risks. Apart from the question as to the particular game or form of exercise, we must be guided in each case by the first signs of anything approaching undue strain. We must look out for lack of energy, for a lessening of joy in the exercise and of spontaneous desire therefor. Fatigue that interferes with appetite, digestion, or sleep is utterly to be condemned.

The Specific Criterion.—Such criteria apply, of course, equally to either sex, though it is more important to be on the look-out for them in the case of the developing girl. But in her case there is another criterion, which is of special importance, because it concerns not only her development as an individual, but her development as a woman. That criterion is furnished us by the menstrual function. It may safely be said that that exercise is excessive and must be immediately curtailed which leads to the diminution of this function, much more to its disappearance. I would, indeed, urge this as a test of the highest importance, always applicable to whatever circumstances. Defect in this respect should never be looked upon lightly; it may, indeed, be a conservative process, as in cases of anaemia, but the cause which produces such an effect is always to be combated.

The Kinds of Exercise.—Given, then, this most important test as to the quantity of exercise of whatever kind—a test which indeed applies no less to mental exercise—we may pass on to consider the kinds of exercise best suited for the girl, it being premised that any one of them, however good in itself and in moderation, is capable of being pursued to excess, and that the danger of this is specially noticeable in the case of the girl, because, as we have seen, the effects of excess are more serious in her case, and also because girls are very apt to take things up with immense keenness, and sometimes, in even greater degree than their brothers, to devote themselves too much to the competitive aspect of things. The girl should certainly be content to play a game for the joy of it, and be scarcely less happy to lose than to win if her side has played the game and made a good fight of it. The competitive element is excessive in almost all sports to-day, and it is especially to be deplored in the games of girls, who are so liable to overstrain and so apt to take trifles to heart.

In what has been already said and in the end of our quotation from Herbert Spencer, it will be evident that purposeful games rather than exercises are to be commended. There is indeed no comparison for a moment possible between Nature's method of exercise, which is obtained through play, and the ridiculous and empty parodies of it which men invent. The truth is that Nature is aiming at one thing, and man at another. Man's aim, for reasons already exploded, is the acquirement of strength; Nature's is the acquirement of skill. It is really nervous development that Nature is interested in when she appears to be persuading the young thing to exercise its muscles. Man notices only the muscular contractions involved, thinks he can improve upon Nature, and invents absurdities like dumb-bells.

It is the nervous system by which we human beings live. Our voluntary muscles are agents of the will, agents of purpose; and while strength is a trifle, skill is always everything. We know now that it is impossible to carry out any human purpose by the contraction of one muscle or even one group of muscles. Even when we merely bend the arm we are doing things with the muscles which extend it, and when we raise it sideways we are modifying the whole trunk in order to preserve the balance. We have only to watch the clumsiness of an infant or a small child to realize how much skill the nervous system has to acquire. This skill may be mainly expressed as co-ordination, the balanced use of many muscles for a purpose and, as a rule, their co-ordinated use with one of the senses, more especially vision, but also touch and hearing.

This is the first of the physiological reasons why games and play of all sorts are so incomparably superior to the use of dumb-bells and developers, where movement and increase of muscular strength are made ends in themselves; whereas in play we are making relations with the outside world, responding to stimuli, educating our nerve muscular apparatus as an instrument of human purpose.

It is in part true to suppose that the play of children expresses an overflow of superfluous energy, but a still deeper and much more important conception of play is that which recognizes in it Nature's method of nervous development, the attainment of control and co-ordination, the capacity of quick and accurate response to circumstances and obedience to the will. Compare, for instance, the girl who has played games, avoiding danger as she crosses the road, with another whose youth has been made dreary by dumb-bells. It may freely be laid down, then, that systems of physical training are good in proportion as they approximate to play, and bad in proportion as they depart from it; and, further, that the very best of them ever devised is worthless in comparison with a good game. This evidently does not refer to, say, special exercises for a curved back.

However, systems of physical training we shall still have with us for a long time to come, and perhaps the mere difficulty of finding room for games makes them necessary, though it may be noted in passing that the last touch of absurdity is accorded to our frequent preference for exercises over games when we conduct the exercises in foul air and prefer them to games in the open air. If exercises we are to have, then they must at least be modelled so as to come as near as possible to play in the two essentials. The first of these has already been mentioned—the preference of skill to strength as an object.

The second, though less obvious, is no less important. What is the most palpable fact of the child's play? It is enjoyment. We have done for ever with the elegant morality which grown-up people, very particular about their own meals, used to impose upon children, and which was based upon the idea that everything which a child enjoys is therefore bad for it. We are learning the elements of the physiology of joy. We find that pleasure and boredom have distinct effects upon the body and the mind, notably in the matter of fatigue. Careful study of fatigue in school children has shown that the hour devoted to physical exercise of the dreary kind under a strict disciplinarian may, instead of being a recreation, actually induce more fatigue than an hour of mathematics. If, then, we cannot allow the girl to play, but must give her some kind of formal exercise, we must at least make it as enjoyable as possible. There are Continental systems of gymnastics which do not believe in the use of music because, forsooth, they find that the music diminishes the disciplinary effect! Such an argument dismisses those who adduce it from the category of those entitled to have anything to do with young people. They should devote themselves to training the rhinoceros, these martinets; the human spirit is not for their mauling. In point of fact one of the redeeming features of physical training is the use of music, which goes far to supply the pleasure that accrues from the natural exercise of games, and greatly reduces the fatigue of which the risk is otherwise by no means inconsiderable. We leave this subject, then, for the nonce, having arrived at the conclusion that the objects of physical training are skill and pleasure rather than strength and discipline; that the system is best which is nearest to play; and that the use of music is specially to be commended.

But, as we have said, artificial physical training at its best is not to be compared with the real thing; more especially if, as is usually the case, the real thing has the advantage of being practised in pure air. We must ask ourselves, then, what sort of games are suitable for girls, and to what extent, if at all, mixed games are desirable. We must first remind ourselves of the proviso that any game may be played to excess, whether physical excess or mental excess, the risk of both of these being involved when the competitive element is made too conspicuous. If this risk be avoided there is no objection, perhaps, to even such a vigorous game as hockey in moderation for girls. The present writer has observed mixed hockey for many years, and finds it impossible to believe that the game should be condemned for girls, but he has always seen it under conditions where the game was simply played for the fun of the thing, and that makes a great difference.

It is certainly open to argument whether, in such a game as hockey, it is not better, on the whole, that girls shall play by themselves, but, as has been urged elsewhere, there is a good deal to be said for the meeting of the sexes elsewhere than in the artificial conditions of the ball-room, since these mixed games widen the field of choice for marriage and provide far more natural and desirable conditions under which the choice may be made. There can be no question that an epoch has been created by the freedom of the modern girl to play games, and to enjoy the movements of a ball, as her brother does. The very fact of her pleasure in games indicates, to those who do not believe that the body is constructed on essentially vicious principles, that they must be good for her. The mere exercise is the least of the good they do. The open air counts for more, as does the development of skill, and the girl's opportunity of sharing in that moral education which all good games involve and which there is no need to insist upon here. Amongst the many things alleged against woman as natural defects by those who have never for a moment troubled to distinguish between nature and nurture, are an incapacity to combine with her sisters, petty dishonour in small things, a blindness to the meaning of "playing the game." It is similarly alleged by such persons against the lower classes that they also do not know how to "play the game," and do not understand the spirit of true sportsmanship, preferring to win anyhow rather than not at all. But those who conduct the Children's Vacation Schools in London—that remarkable arrangement by which children are damaged in school time and educated in holidays—are aware that in a short time children of any class can be taught to "play the game," if only they can be made to see it from that point of view. So also women can learn to combine, to be unselfish, to avoid petty deceits even in games, to obey a captain and to accept the umpire's decision, when they are taught, as we all have to be taught, that that is playing the game.

These immense virtues of the new departure must by no means be forgotten in the course of the reaction which is bound to occur, and is indeed necessary, against the contemporary practice of trying to demonstrate that boys and girls are substantially identical. He who pleads for the golden mean is always abused by extremists of both parties, but is always justified in the long run, and this is a case where the golden mean is eminently desirable, being indeed vital, which is much more than golden. Safety is to be found in our recognition of elementary physiological principles, assuming from the first that though it is not difficult to turn a girl into something like a boy, it is not desirable; and especially in attending carefully, in the case of each individual, to the indications furnished by that characteristic physiological function, interference with which necessarily imperils womanhood.

The organism is a whole; it reacts not only to physical strain but to mental strain. There are parts of the world, including a country no less distinguished as a pioneer of education than Scotland, where serious mental strain is now being imposed upon girls at this very period of the dawn of womanhood, when strain of any kind is especially to be deplored. Utterly ignoring the facts of physiology, the laws and approximate dates of human development, official regulations demand that at just such ages as thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen large numbers of girls—and picked girls—shall devote themselves to the strain of preparing for various examinations, upon which much depends. Worry combines to work its effects with those of excessive mental application, excessive use of the eyes at short distances, and defective open-air amusement. The whole examination system is of course to be condemned, but most especially when its details are so devised as to press thus hardly upon girlhood at this critical and most to be protected period. Many years ago Herbert Spencer protested that we must acquaint ourselves with the laws of life, since these underlie all the activities of living beings. The time is now at hand when we shall discover that education is a problem in applied biology, and that the so-called educator, whether he works destruction from some Board of Education or elsewhere, who knows and cares nothing about the laws of the life of the being with whom he deals, is simply an ignorant and dangerous quack.

What has been said about the reaction against excess in the physical education of girls applies very forcibly to excess in their mental education. We are undoubtedly coming upon a period when more and more will be heard of the injurious consequences of such ill-timed preparation for stupid examinations as has been referred to; and there will be not a few to sigh for the return to the bad old days which a certain type of mind always calls good. Here, again, we must find the golden mean, recognizing that the danger lies in excess, and especially in ill-timed excess. We shall further discover that if we desire a girl to become a woman, and not an indescribable, we must provide for her a kind of higher education which shall take into account the object at which we aim. It will be found that there are womanly concerns, of profound importance to a girl and therefore to an empire, which demand no less of the highest mental and moral qualities than any of the subjects in a man's curriculum, and the pursuit of which in reason does not compromise womanhood, but only ratifies and empowers it.

Muscles worth Developing.—When men and women are carefully compared, it is found that women, muscularly weaker as a whole, are most notably so as regards the arms, the muscles of respiration, and the muscles of the back. The muscles of the legs, and especially of the thighs, are relatively stronger. In these facts we can find some practical guidance. The muscles of all the limbs may be left comparatively out of account; whether naturally weak or naturally strong they are of subordinate importance. On the other hand, it is always worth while to cultivate the muscles of respiration, as it is always worth while to keep the heart in good order. Again, the weakness of the muscles of the back, and more especially in the case of the growing girl, is not a thing to be accepted as readily as the weakness of the biceps and the forearm muscles. Various observers find a proportion of between 85 per cent. and 90 per cent. of those suffering from lateral curvature of the spine to be girls, the great majority of these cases occurring between the ages of ten and fifteen. Everywhere it is our duty to prevent such cases, and everywhere physical training will find only too abundant opportunities for endeavouring to correct them. It may be doubted perhaps whether we may rightly follow Havelock Ellis in attributing woman's liability to backache to the relative weakness of the muscles of the back, for we know how often this symptom depends upon not muscular but internal causes peculiar to woman. On the other hand, we may certainly follow Havelock Ellis when he says, regarding this lateral curvature of the spine, from which so many girls and women suffer: "There can be no doubt that defective muscular development of the back, occurring at the age of maximum development, and due to the conventional restraints on exercises involving the body, and also to the use of stays, which hamper the freedom of such movements, is here a factor of very great importance." We shall not here concern ourselves with the details of practice, but the principle is to be laid down that perhaps second only in importance to the right development of the heart and the muscles of respiration is that of the muscles of the back.

Always, however, we are apt to judge by the obvious and to value it unduly. Nature makes the biceps and the muscles of the forearm naturally the weakest in woman compared with man, but it is just the bending of the elbow that makes a good show on a horizontal bar or rope; and so we devote too much time to the training of these muscles in our girls, with the results which make such creditable exhibitions at the end of the session, while we forget the muscles of the back, the right development of which is far more valuable, but does not lend itself to display.

In this connection it is to be added last, but not least, that special importance attaches in woman to those muscles which one may perhaps call the muscles of motherhood. It is common experience amongst physicians to find the appropriate muscularity defective at childbirth in women the muscles of whose limbs may have been very highly developed. Thus Dr. Havelock Ellis, amongst other evidence, quotes that of a physician, who says: "In regard to this interesting and suggestive question, it does seem a fact that women who exercise all their muscles persistently meet with increased difficulties in parturition. It would certainly seem that excessive development of the muscular system is unfavourable to maternity. I hear from instructors in physical training, both in the United States and in England, of excessively tedious and painful confinements among their fellows—two or three cases in each instance only, but this within the knowledge of a single individual among his friends. I have also several such reports from the circus—perhaps exceptions. I look upon this as a not impossible result of muscular exertion in women, the development of muscle, muscular attachments, and bony frame leading to approximation to the male."