t career, conceived with certain friends the
notion of forming a community having goods in common; the scheme was
almost effected when it was discovered that "those little wives, which
some already had, and others would shortly have," objected, and so it
fell through. Perhaps the _mulierculae_ were right. It is simply a rather
remote instance of a fundamental divergence amply illustrated before our
eyes. If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each
other's natures with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine
comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth. Another wholesome
reform, promoted by co-education, is the physical education of women. In
the case of boys special attention has generally been given to physical
education, and the lack of it is one among several artificial causes of
that chronic ill-health which so often handicaps women. Women must have
the same education as men, Miss Faithfull shrewdly observes, because
that is sure to be the best. The present education of boys cannot,
however, be counted a model, and the gradual introduction of
co-education will produce many wholesome reforms. If the intimate
association of the sexes destroys what remnant may linger of the
unhealthy ideal of chivalry--according to which a woman was treated as a
cross between an angel and an idiot--that is matter for rejoicing.
Wherever men and women stand in each other's presence the sexual
instinct will always ensure an adequate ideal halo.

III

The chief question that we have to ask when we consider the changing
status of women is: How will it affect the reproduction of the race?
Hunger and love are the two great motor impulses, the ultimate source,
probably, of all other impulses. Hunger--that is to say, what we call
"economic causes"--has, because it is the more widespread and constant,
though not necessarily the more imperious instinct, produced nearly all
the great zoological revolutions, including, as we have seen, the rise
and fall of that phase of human evolution dominated by mother-law. Yet
love has, in the form of sexual selection, even before we reach the
vertebrates, moulded races to the ideal of the female; and reproduction
is always the chief end of nutrition which hunger waits on, the supreme
aim of life everywhere.

If we place on the one side man, as we know him during the historical
period, and on the other, nearly every highly organized member of the
animal family, there a