tion on humanity as a whole--it is the choice
between finding new forms of labour or sinking slowly into a condition
of more or less complete and passive sex-parasitism! (It is not without
profound interest to note the varying phenomena of sex-parasitism as
they present themselves in the animal world, both in the male and in the
female form. Though among the greater number of species in the animal
world the female form is larger and more powerful rather than the male
(e.g., among birds of prey, such as eagles, falcons, vultures, &c., and
among fishes, insects, &c.), yet sex-parasitism appears among both sex
forms. In certain sea-creatures, for example, the female carries about
in the folds of her covering three or four minute and quite inactive
males, who are entirely passive and dependent upon her. Among termites,
on the other hand, the female has so far degenerated that she has
entirely lost the power of locomotion; she can no longer provide herself
or her offspring with nourishment, or defend or even clean herself; she
has become a mere passive, distended bag of eggs, without intelligence
or activity, she and her offspring existing through the exertions of
the workers of the community. Among other insects, such, for example, as
certain ticks, another form of female parasitism prevails, and while the
male remains a complex, highly active, and winded creature, the female,
fastening herself by the head into the flesh of some living animal
and sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity, and power of
locomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filled
with eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been
life. It is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly probable,
that it has been this degeneration and parasitism on the part of the
female which has set its limitation to the evolution of ants, creatures
which, having reached a point of mental development in some respects
almost as high as that of man, have yet become curiously and immovably
arrested. The whole question of sex-parasitism among the lower animals
is one throwing suggestive and instructive side-lights on human social
problems, but is too extensive to be here entered on.)

Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures
a certain stage of material civilisation has been reached, a curious
tendency has manifested itself for the human female to become more
or less parasitic; social conditions