easts) that he finds
his greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the degradation and
uselessness of his existence less obvious to himself and to others than
if he passed his life reclining in an armchair.

On Yorkshire moors today may be seen walls of sod, behind which hide
certain human males, while hard-labouring men are employed from early
dawn in driving birds towards them. As the birds are driven up to him,
the hunter behind his wall raises his deadly weapon, and the bird, which
it had taken so much human labour to rear and provide, falls dead at his
feet; thereby greatly to the increase of the hunter's glory, when, the
toils of the chase over, he returns to his city haunts to record his
bag. One might almost fancy one saw arise from the heathery turf the
shade of some ancient Teutonic ancestor, whose dust has long reposed
there, pointing a finger of scorn at his degenerate descendant, as he
leers out from behind the sod wall. During the the later Roman Empire,
Commodus, in the degenerate days of Rome, at great expense had wild
beasts brought from distant lands that he might have the glory of
slaying them in the Roman circus; and medals representing himself as
Hercules slaying the Nemean lion were struck at his orders. We are not
aware that any representation has yet been made in the region of plastic
art of the hero of the sod wall; but history repeats itself--and that
also may come. It is to be noted that these hunters are not youths,
but often ripely adult men, before whom all the lofty enjoyments and
employments possible to the male in modern life, lie open.)

These peculiarities in her condition have in all civilised societies
laid the female more early and seriously open to the attacks of
parasitism than the male. And while the accumulation of wealth has
always been the antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and effeteness
of the male the final and obvious cause, of the decay of the great
dominant races of the past; yet, between these two has always lain, as a
great middle term, the parasitism of the female, without which the first
would have been inoperative and the last impossible.

Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth, could destroy
a nation by enervation, whose women remained active, virile, and
laborious.

The conception which again and again appears to have haunted successive
societies, that it was a possibility for the human male to advance
in physical power and intellectual