ildlessness are
perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of
ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered
into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons
identical with ours--the increased competitiveness of the modern
life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the
satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And
their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation,
divorce, and aversion to childbearing leave nothing to be desired,
in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or
for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence
through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to
child-bearing in the Roman world--for she did not exist. It could not
have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for _she_ did not
exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire
woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which
comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes
from the exercise of sexual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern
world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the
emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for
equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her
girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her;
trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the
dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously
irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her
real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of
habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to
share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they
had, just as we have her, in smaller number, it is true, but in
identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury
the _start_? Wasn't it only the means to the _finish_?

Eating a grouse destroys, in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a
ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider down or on straw,
arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably
immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is
g