te amount of
wealth. Any sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy
him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely
parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally
tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any
enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the
different points at which enervation is reached by different females
came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire
was visited by a woman, the daughter and also the widow of small
professional men. She stated that she was in need of both food and
clothing. The millionaire's wife gave her a leg of mutton and two
valuable dresses. The woman proceeded to whine, though in vigorous
health, that she had no one to carry them home for her, and could
not think of carrying them herself. The American, the descendant of
generations of able, labouring, New England, Puritan women, tucked the
leg of mutton under one arm and the bundle of clothes under the other
and walked off down the city street towards the woman's dwelling,
followed by the astonished pauper parasite.

The most helpless case of female degeneration we ever came into contact
with was that of a daughter of a poor English officer on half-pay and
who had to exist on a few hundreds a year. This woman could neither
cook her own food nor make her own clothes, nor was she engaged in any
social, political, or intellectual or artistic labour. Though able to
dance for a night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardly
able to do her own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely to
have lost all power of compelling herself to do anything which was at
the moment fatiguing or displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, however
great its ultimate reward. In a life of twenty-eight years this
woman had probably not contributed one hour's earnest toil, mental or
physical, to the increase of the sum total of productive human labour.
Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she would possibly have
preferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than have cultivated half
an acre for food. This is an extreme case; but the ultimate effect of
parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel
oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and
exhaustive.

That the two problems are not identical is shown, if indeed evidence
were needed, by the fact that those males mos