f illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to
palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If
such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This
spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women
against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; as exhibited by
men against the righteous claims of women, it is one of the supremely
malign forces of history. Wherever and however displayed, it is false to
the first and most essential facts of life, from the moment of the
evolution of sex, hundreds of millions of years ago, until our own time.
All who display it, however excellent their intentions, are enemies of
mankind; all who work upon it for their own ends, political and
personal, without feeling it, are beneath disgust. These are things true
and necessary to be said, though they should not deter us from
sympathizing with the unhappy individuals, not a few, whose lives have
been blasted by individuals of the other sex, and who show the natural
but tragic tendency to make their private injury cause for resentment
against one-half of mankind. Surveying the pages that are past, I am
almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a
special chapter was not devoted to Sex-Antagonism and to a demonstration
on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be
found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.

If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters,
let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am
an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I
call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking
for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express
in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the
long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is
reaching a definite issue.

These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the
_organic_ and the _internecine_. The internecine conception of society
forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against
class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground
that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false.
Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it
is the Great Lie.

And it is being found out. Even internation