ant son for
a bottle of spirits or a little coin; and even among somewhat more
mentally developed females, strong as is the affection of the average
female for her new born offspring, the closeness of the relation between
mother and child tends rapidly to shrink as time passes, so that by
the time of adolescence is reached the relation between mother and son
becomes little more than a remembrance of a close inter-union which
once existed. It is, perhaps, seldom, till the very highest point of
intellectual growth and mental virility has been reached by the human
female, that her relation with her male offspring becomes a permanent
and active and dominant factor in the lives of both. The concentrated
and all-absorbing affection and fellowship which existed between the
greatest female intellect France has produced and the son she bore,
dominating both lives to the end, the fellowship of the English
historian with his mother, who remained his chosen companion and the
sharer of all his labours through life, the relation of St. Augustine
to his mother, and those of countless others, are relations almost
inconceivable where the woman is not of commanding and active
intelligence, and where the passion of mere physical instinct is
completed by the passion of the intellect and spirit.

There appears, then, from the study of human nature in the past, no
ground for supposing that if, as a result of woman's adopting new forms
of labour, she should become more free, more wealthy, or more actively
intelligent, that this could in any way diminish her need of the
physical and mental comradeship of man, nor his need of her; nor that
it would affect their secondary sexual relations as progenitors, save
by deepening, concentrating, and extending throughout life the parental
emotions. The conception that man's and woman's need of each other could
be touched, or the emotions binding the sexes obliterated, by any mere
change in the form of labour performed by the woman of the race, is as
grotesque in its impossibility, as the suggestion that the placing of a
shell on the seashore this way or that might destroy the action of the
earth's great tidal wave.

But, it may be objected, "If there be absolutely no ground for the
formation of such an opinion, how comes it that, in one form or another,
it is so often expressed by persons who object to the entrance of woman
into new or intellectual fields of labour? Where there is smoke must
there not