period
of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else.
Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize
the promise of Wordsworth to the girl who preferred walks in the country
to algebra and symbolic logic:--

Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A woman may be made.
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.

Where is the woman, recognizable as such, who will question that the
brother of Dorothy Wordsworth was right?

In the following pages, it is sought to show that, women being
constructed by Nature, as individuals, for her racial ends, they best
realize themselves, are happier and more beautiful, live longer and more
useful lives, when they follow, as mothers or foster-mothers in the wide
and scarcely metaphorical sense of that word, the career suggested in
Wordsworth's lovely lines.

It remains to state the most valuable end which this book might possibly
achieve--an end which, by one means or another, must be achieved. It is
that the best women, those favoured by Nature in physique and
intelligence, in character and their emotional nature, the women who are
increasingly to be found enlisted in the ranks of Feminism, and fighting
the great fight for the Women's Cause, shall be convinced by the
unchangeable and beneficent facts of biology, seen in the bodies and
minds of women, and shall direct their efforts accordingly; so that they
and those of their sisters who are of the same natural rank, instead of
increasingly deserting the ranks of motherhood and leaving the blood of
inferior women to constitute half of all future generations, shall on
the contrary furnish an ever-increasing proportion of our wives and
mothers, to the great gain of themselves, and of men, and of the future.

For in some of its forms to-day the Woman's Cause is _not_ man's, nor
the future's, nor even, as I shall try to show, woman's. But a Eugenic
Feminism, for which I try to show the warrant in the study of woman's
nature, would indeed be the cause of man, and should enlist the whole
heart and head of every man who has them to offer. For here is a
principle which benefits men to the whole immeasurable extent involved
in decreeing that the best women must be the wives. "The best women for
o