s,
and depraved, is for prophets only to predict. If changes continue in
the present direction much that is now in bad odour may come to be
accepted as normal. It might happen, for instance, as a consequence of
woman's independence, that mothers alone should be their children's
guardians and sole mistresses in their houses; the husband, if he were
acknowledged at all, having at most a pecuniary responsibility for his
offspring. Such an arrangement would make a stable home for the
children, while leaving marriage dissoluble at the will of either party.

It may well be doubted, however, whether women, if given every
encouragement to establish and protect themselves, would not in the end
fly again into man's arms and prefer to be drudges and mistresses at
home to living disciplined and submerged in some larger community.
Indeed, the effect of women's emancipation might well prove to be the
opposite of what was intended. Really free and equal competition between
men and women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferiority
that, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they should
find themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would have
to begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction and to
men's fondness in order to regain their lost social position.

[Sidenote: The ideal includes generation.]

There is a certain order in progress which it is impossible to retract.
An advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest which
it furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; had
agriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its own
rationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal in
which those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which created
the ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and death
were abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: its
pleasures would cease to charm the mind, and its results--pregnancy,
child-birth, infancy--would seem positively horrible. But so long as
reproduction is necessary the ideal of life must include it. Otherwise
we should be constructing not an ideal of life but some dream of
non-human happiness, a dream whose only remnant of ideality would be
borrowed from such actual human functions as it still expressed
indirectly. The true ideal must speak for all necessary and compatible
functions. Man being an inevitably reproductive anima