ed with
gratuitous advice on these subjects, never tell men that their duty is
fatherhood or that they should make themselves attractive or that their
sphere is also the home. Until these one-sided points of view are
adjusted to a more reasonable basis, we shall not reach an
understanding. They are as unjust as the farmer who ploughs with a steam
plow and lets his wife cart water from a distant well instead of
providing convenient plumbing.

Women who are fitted for motherhood and have a talent for it can enter
it with advantage. There is a talent for motherhood exactly as there is
for other things. Other women have genius which can be of greatest
service to the community in other ways. They should have opportunity to
find their sphere. If this is "Feminism," it is also simple justice. One
reason that we are at sea in some of the problems of the women's-rights
movement, is that the history of women has been mainly written by men.
The question of motherhood, the sexual life of women, and the position
of women as it has been or is likely to be affected by their sexual
characteristics, must be more exactly ascertained before definite
conclusions can be reached. At present there is too much that we don't
know. We need more scientific investigations of the type of Mr. Havelock
Ellis's admirable _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_[433] and less of
pseudo-scientific lucubrations like Otto Weininger's _Sex and
Character_. When human society has rid itself of the bogies and
nightmares, superstitions and prejudices, which have borne upon it with
crushing force, it will be in a better position to construct an ideal
system of government. Meanwhile experiments are and must be made. Woman
suffrage is not necessarily a reform; it is a necessary step in
evolution.

One venerable bogey I wish to dispose of before I close. It is that the
Roman Empire was ruined and collapsed because the increasing liberty
given to women and the equality granted the sexes under the Empire
produced immorality that destroyed the State. The trouble with Rome was
that it failed to grasp the fundamentals of economic law. Slavery, the
concentration of land in a few hands, and the theory that all taxation
has for its end the enriching of a select few, were the fallacies which,
in the last analysis, caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. The
luxury, immorality, and race-suicide which are popularly conceived to
have been the immediate causes of Rome's decline a