第23章

On Yorkshire moors today may be seen walls of sod, behind which hide certain human males, while hard-labouring men are employed from early dawn in driving birds towards them.As the birds are driven up to him, the hunter behind his wall raises his deadly weapon, and the bird, which it had taken so much human labour to rear and provide, falls dead at his feet;thereby greatly to the increase of the hunter's glory, when, the toils of the chase over, he returns to his city haunts to record his bag.One might almost fancy one saw arise from the heathery turf the shade of some ancient Teutonic ancestor, whose dust has long reposed there, pointing a finger of scorn at his degenerate descendant, as he leers out from behind the sod wall.During the the later Roman Empire, Commodus, in the degenerate days of Rome, at great expense had wild beasts brought from distant lands that he might have the glory of slaying them in the Roman circus; and medals representing himself as Hercules slaying the Nemean lion were struck at his orders.We are not aware that any representation has yet been made in the region of plastic art of the hero of the sod wall; but history repeats itself--and that also may come.It is to be noted that these hunters are not youths, but often ripely adult men, before whom all the lofty enjoyments and employments possible to the male in modern life, lie open.)These peculiarities in her condition have in all civilised societies laid the female more early and seriously open to the attacks of parasitism than the male.And while the accumulation of wealth has always been the antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and effeteness of the male the final and obvious cause, of the decay of the great dominant races of the past; yet, between these two has always lain, as a great middle term, the parasitism of the female, without which the first would have been inoperative and the last impossible.

Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth, could destroy a nation by enervation, whose women remained active, virile, and laborious.

The conception which again and again appears to have haunted successive societies, that it was a possibility for the human male to advance in physical power and intellectual vigour, while his companion female became stationary and inactive, taking no share in the labours of society beyond the passive fulfilment of sexual functions, has always been negated.It has ended as would end the experiment of a man seeking to raise a breed of winning race-horses out of unexercised, short-winded, knock-kneed mares.

No, more disastrously! For while the female animal transmits herself to her descendant only or mainly by means of germinal inheritance, and through the influence she may exert over it during gestation, the human female, by producing the intellectual and moral atmosphere in which the early infant years of life are passed, impresses herself far more indelibly on her descendants.Only an able and labouring womanhood can permanently produce an able and labouring manhood; only an effete and inactive male can ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive womanhood.The curled darling, scented and languid, with his drawl, his delicate apparel, his devotion to the rarity and variety of his viands, whose severest labour is the search after pleasure, and for whom even the chase, which was for his remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toil essential for the meat and life of his people, becomes a luxurious and farcical amusement;--this male, whether found in the later Roman Empire, the Turkish harem of today, or in our Northern civilisations, is possible only because generations of parasitic women have preceded him.More repulsive than the parasite female herself, because a yet further product of decay, it is yet only the scent of his mother's boudoir that we smell in his hair.He is like to the bald patches and rotten wool on the back of a scabby sheep; which indeed indicate that, deep beneath the surface, a parasite insect is eating its way into the flesh, but which are not so much the cause of disease, as its final manifestation.

As we have said it is the power of the human female to impress herself on her descendants, male and female, not only through germinal inheritance, through influence during the period of gestation, but above all by producing the mental atmosphere in which the impressionable infant years of life are passed, which makes the condition of the child-bearing female one of paramount interest of the race.It is this fact which causes even prostitution (in many other respects the most repulsive of all the forms of female parasitism which afflicts humanity) to be, probably, not more adverse to the advance and even to the conservation of a healthy and powerful society, than the parasitism of its child-bearing women.For the prostitute, heavily as she weights society for her support, returning disease and mental and emotional disintegration for what she consumes, does not yet so immediately affect the next generation as the kept wife, or kept mistress, who impresses her effete image indelibly on the generations succeeding.(It cannot be too often repeated that the woman who merely bears and brings a child into the world, and then leaves it to be fed and reared by the hands of another, has performed very much less than half of the labour of producing adult humans; in such cases it is the nurse and not the mother who is the most important labourer.)No man ever yet entered life farther than the length of one navel-cord from the body of the woman who bore him.It is the woman who is the final standard of the race, from which there can be no departure for any distance for any length of time, in any direction: as her brain weakens, weakens the man's she bears; as her muscle softens, softens his; as she decays, decays the people.

Other causes may, and do, lead to the enervation and degeneration of a class or race; the parasitism of its child-bearing women must.

We, the European women of this age, stand today where again and again, in the history of the past, women of other races have stood; but our condition is yet more grave, and of wider import to humanity as a whole than theirs ever was.Let us again consider more closely why this is so.