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the one great inalienable right to realize personality,
to develope the perfect character in such measure as
heredity and environment allow

As the right of the man is to be fully man, so the right of the woman is to be fully woman. That is the claim which justice makes for her. What harms distinctive womanhood, must be reckoned, not among her rights, but among her wrongs.

This is the true first principle which should serve as the criterion whereby to judge the specific claims made for woman in the name of her rights

Would it not harm distinctive womanhood if she were on the same footing as men in respect of public life? It seems unquestionable that the effect of woman's participation in elections, and of her presence in Parliament, would be largely to unsex her

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The same must be said of most of the callings traditionally reserved for men. Thus, for the practice of the law, women, in general, are gravely disqualified by their singularly unjudicial habit of mind. It would not be easy to convert women from feeling to reasoning animals; and well-nigh all that is pure womanly would perish in the process

Still less in keeping with the attributes of distinctive womanhood is the profession of medicine and surgery. A young woman can hardly go through the instruction necessary to qualify for it, without detriment to the modesty which is the chief ornament of her sex

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It is urged that the two sexes are unequal in their sexual
relations, and that this inequality is wrong.
are told that breach of chastity should be regarded

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as equally heinous in both, and that the stringency of
the marriage tie should be relaxed in favour of
female freedom. But assuredly it would harm dis-
tinctive womanhood if chastity were considered as
of no more consequence in woman than in man. And
an utterly indissoluble union, a "consortium omnis
vita," is the only true guarantee of woman's wifely
dignity, and the first of her rights

It remains to speak of the co-education of the two sexes. The best education for woman is that which best fits her intellectually and physically for her work in the world. In woman's education distinctive womanhood should ever be kept in view. There is strong evidence that the acquisition by women of certain virile faculties, through participating in virile education, is usually purchased by the impairment of her feminine attributes, physical as well as psychical

Dr. Maudsley has well summed the matter up. "While woman preserves her sex, she will necessarily be feebler than man, and having her special bodily and mental characteristics, will have, to a certain extent, her own sphere of activity. When she has become thoroughly masculine in nature, and hermaphrodite in mind-when, in fact, she has pretty well divested herself of her sex-then she may take his ground and do his work; but she will have lost her feminine attractions, and probably, also, her chief feminine functions"

The specification of the sexes is at once the most poetical and the most practical outcome of human evolution. To destroy it is the enterprise upon which the champions of the Women's Rights movement are, perhaps unconsciously, engaged

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SUMMARY.

That the enterprise will succeed is incredible.

"What

was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot
be annulled by Act of Parliament "

CHAPTER VII.

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SUPPLY AND DEMAND.

A trade crisis: an illustration of the working of the great principle of unrestricted competition regulating the price of things by Supply and Demand-the principle upon which what is current in this country as "Political Economy" hangs

How the law of Supply and Demand actually operates

This law is the outcome of what Adam Smith called "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty": it is based upon the assumption that all men are perfectly free and economically equal; which assumption is false

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And it is of such arbitrary assumptions, and of deductions from them, and generalizations of them, that the socalled "Science of Political Economy," constructed by the school of Adam Smith, is largely composed 194

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The master error of the school is that they regard man as a constant quantity in every problem, always wholly governed by selfishness, and make entire abstraction of every other passion and motive.

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But a "science" thus constructed, by applying the deductive method to this one isolated motive of human nature, and by balancing abstract ideas in an unreal world, is no science at all: it is a pseudo-science

There is a vast difference between an abstract idea and a principle

The speculations of these Political Economists, however they may have intended, have been taken as "rules ready for immediate application in practical politics": nay, as "a complete philosophy of social and indus trial life." The intense individualism of the age has erected them into a sort of Utilitarian Gospel, side by side with which has been introduced a Utilitarian morality; a miserable abortion of morality, emptied of the aboriginal moral idea

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One result of this Gospel according to Bentham, has been the growth of the belief that the accumulation of wealth is the summum bonum of nations, as of individuals; by "wealth being meant "all useful or agreeable things which possess exchangeable value." But this is a very false conception of national prosperity. The nation is most prosperous which has the least pauperism; in which the greatest. number possible participate in the things necessary for the decent ordering of life.

The practical fruits of the installation of Mammon as "the master idol of this realm" are (a) the grinding of the poor in the competition of capitalists, and the consequent antagonism of capital and labour, issuing in strikes and lock-outs, whereby the bonds of national life are being dissolved, and the conditions of economic prosperity are being destroyed

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(b) the universal prevalence of lying in the form of advertisement, and of cheating in the form of adulteration, which is really the main cause of our country's loss of custom, especially with the colonies, and of the depression of her commerce

Fraud upon workers, fraud upon buyers must, by the very nature of things, issue in the destruction of a society which tolerates it. Socialism, Communism, Nihilism are the handwriting upon the wall, portending the destruction of a social order resting on wrong and robbery

Different expressions of the same movement, they mean the negation of country, of history, of liberty, of property, of all that constitutes civilization in the highest sense. Yet Mr. Mill has recorded his opinion that even Communism would be better than "the present state of society with all its suffering and injustices"

But is the present state of things or Communism the alternative? Happily, no. For both the rampant individualism of the existing economic order, and the universal slavery with a modicum of pigswash for all, proposed to us under the names of Communism, Socialism, Nihilism, are open to the same fatal objection: they are all alike founded solely on the greed of human nature: they recognize only the lower self in man, the self of the animal nature and passions, and ignore the rational and spiritual self

There is only one remedy for the evils under which society is suffering, and that is in the recognition of the fact that man is an ethical animal, and that in economical relations, as in all relations, he is under

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