the
nature of any material adjunct to life in itself, but in the power it
may possess of robbing the individual of all incentive to exertion, thus
destroying the intellectual, the physical, and finally, the moral fibre.

In all the civilisations of the past examination will show that almost
invariably it has been the female who has tended first to reach this
point, and we think examination will show that it has almost invariably
been from the woman to the man that enervation and decay have spread.

Why this should be so is obvious. Firstly, it is in the sphere of
domestic labour that slave or hired labour most easily and insidiously
penetrates. The force of blows or hireling gold can far more easily
supply labourers as the preparers of food and clothing, and even as the
rearers of children, than it can supply labourers fitted to be entrusted
with the toils of war and government, which have in the past been the
especial sphere of male toil. The Roman woman had for generations been
supplanted in the sphere of her domestic labours and in the toil of
rearing and educating her offspring, and had long become abjectly
parasitic, before the Roman male had been able to substitute the labour
of the hireling and barbarian for his own, in the army, and in the
drudgeries of governmental toil.

Secondly, the female having one all-important though passive function
which cannot be taken from her, and which is peculiarly connected
with her own person, in the act of child-bearing, and her mere sexual
attributes being an object of desire and cupidity to the male, she is
liable in a peculiarly insidious and gradual manner to become dependent
on this one sexual function alone for her support. So much is this the
case, that even when she does not in any way perform this function there
is still a curious tendency for the kudos of the function still to hang
about her, and for her mere potentiality in the direction of a duty
which she may never fulfil, to be confused in her own estimation and
that of society with the actual fulfilment of that function. Under the
mighty aegis of the woman who bears and rears offspring and in other
directions labours greatly and actively for her race, creeps in
gradually and unnoticed the woman who does none of these things. From
the mighty labouring woman who bears human creatures to the full extent
of her power, rears her offspring unaided, and performs at the same
time severe social labour in other direction