courage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield may have
its food, a food more precious to us than our heart's blood; it is we
especially, who in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word no
man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of
war and to labour there till in the course of generations we have
extinguished it.

If today we claim all labour for our province, yet more especially do we
claim those fields in which the difference in the reproductive function
between man and woman may place male and female at a slightly different
angle with regard to certain phases of human life.

Chapter V. Sex Differences.

If we examine the physical phenomenon of sex as it manifests itself in
the human creature, we find, in the first stages of the individual's
existence, no difference discernible, by any means we have at present at
our command, between those germs which are ultimately to become male or
female. Later, in the foetal life, at birth, and through infancy though
the organs of sex serve to distinguish the male from the female, there
is in the general structure and working of the organism little or
nothing to divide the sexes.

Even when puberty is reached, with its enormous development of sexual
and reproductive activity modifying those parts of the organism
with which it is concerned, and producing certain secondary sexual
characteristics, there yet remains the major extent of the human
body and of physical function little, or not at all, affected by sex
modification. The eye, the ear, the sense of touch, the general organs
of nutrition and respiration and volition are in the main identical,
and often differ far more in persons of the same sex than in those of
opposite sexes; and even on the dissecting-table the tissues of the male
and female are often wholly indistinguishable.

It is when we consider the reproductive organs themselves and their
forms of activity, and such parts of the organism modified directly
in relation to them, that a real and important difference is found
to exist, radical though absolutely complemental. It is exactly as we
approach the reproductive functions that the male and female bodies
differ; exactly as we recede from them that they become more and more
similar, and even absolutely identical. Taking the eye, perhaps the most
highly developed, complex organ in the body, and, if of an organ the
term may be allowed, the most intellectual organ o