so far insured against destruction. Incessant
and persistent child-bearing is thus truly the highest duty and the most
socially esteemed occupation of the primitive woman, equalling fully in
social importance the labour of the man as hunter and warrior.

Even under those conditions of civilisation which have existed in the
centuries which divide primitive savagery from high civilisation, the
demand for continuous, unbroken child-bearing on the part of the woman
as her loftiest social duty has generally been hardly less imperious.
Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, and down almost to our own day,
the rate of infant mortality was almost as large as in a savage state;
medical ignorance destroyed innumerable lives; antiseptic surgery being
unknown, serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the low
state of sanitary science, plagues such as those which in the reign
of Justinian swept across the civilised world from India to Northern
Europe, well nigh depopulating the globe, or the Black Death of 1349,
which in England alone swept away more than half the population of the
island, were but extreme forms of the destruction of population going on
continually as the result of zymotic disease; while wars were not
merely far more common but, owing to the famines which almost invariably
followed them, were far more destructive to human life than in our own
days, and deaths by violence, whether at the hands of the state or as
the result of personal enmity, were of daily occurrence in all lands.
Under these conditions abstinence on the part of woman from incessant
child-bearing might have led to almost the same serious diminution or
even extinction of her people, as in the savage state; while the very
existence of her civilisation depended on the production of an immense
number of individuals as beasts of burden, without the expenditure
of whose crude muscular force in physical labour of agriculture and
manufacture those intermediate civilisations would, in the absence of
machinery, have been impossible. Twenty men had to be born, fed at the
breast, and reared by women to perform the crude brute labour which is
performed today by one small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the demand
for large masses of human creatures as mere reservoirs of motor force
for accomplishing the simplest processes was imperative. So strong,
indeed, was the consciousness of the importance to society of continuous
child-bearing on the part of woman,