rs of men who hate or fear women, and women who
hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any
other could possibly be born of such emotions.

Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living
beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species
exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental
reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere
meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which
determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof.

If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an
attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman
and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions
has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to
be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the
fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women
must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their
superiority to the future stock.

Let us briefly sum up the substance of the foregoing pages.

First, we have stated the eugenic postulate, failing to grant which we
and our schemes, our votes and our hopes, will assuredly disappear or
decay, as must all living races which are not recruited from their
best, Secondly, we have proceeded to analyze the nature of womanhood,
its capacities and conditions, assuming that we can scarcely discover
whither it should go unless we know what it is. To the party politician,
hungry for the prizes that suit his soul or stomach, such an assumption
is mere foolish pedantry; and the ardent suffragist will have little
more to say to it. That, however, cannot be helped. It is to be hoped
that all parties, _as parties_, will unite in banning the views herein
expressed, and then one may take heart of grace and dare to hope that
there is something in them.

They may be crystallized in the dictum that woman is Nature's supreme
organ of the future. This is not a theory, but a statement of evident
truth. It is an essential canon of what one might call the philosophy of
biology, and applies to the female sex throughout living nature. Birth
is of the female alone. No sub-human male, nor even man himself, can
directly achieve the future; the greatest statesman or law-giver or
founder of nations can only work, if he knew it, through womanhood. The
grea