WOMAN’S SYNTHETIC POWERS AS AN INSTRUMENT TO EFFICIENCY
The most effective instruments for bringing this about are the synthetic powers of woman herself, combined with her practical skill and her ready intuition. As we have tried to show, the best chance for the eliciting and the disciplining of these powers of hers, so as best to fit them for the struggle of modern life, is afforded by biology.
It must be clear how many reforms—impossible to the nominally educated women of the present day—would flow easily from this better training of women; for those so trained could certainly not endure the futility of some of our educational ideals, nor that haphazard disregard of the nature and needs of the child, which still characterises so much of our educational method. They could not support the continuance of many of the common evils of modern life—the noise and dirt, the brutality of manners, the scamping of work, the rush for pleasure. These, however they may or may not affect the adult, are plainly impairing the best 70 promise of the children; and that fact will be enough for the truly educated woman.
Knowing, too, as she will, more accurately and scientifically than women to-day generally know, how largely energy and depression, irritability and calm strength are questions of right or wrong food, the educated woman may be trusted to find a means to put an end to the crying iniquity of adulteration. Directly or indirectly, by the pressure of her determination that the race shall no longer be offered a sacrifice to Mammon, she will assuredly find a way to put an end to all not absolutely necessary dangerous trades.
The opposition of such women to what is wrong in social custom, in government, in education, will be a very different thing from the opposition of well-meaning but imperfectly instructed women on the one hand; or, on the other, that of a few thoroughly trained and informed ones working more or less in isolation, scattered over the country. It would mean a body of sound, enlightened, disinterested public opinion, so vast, so far-reaching, yet so intimately cognisant of all the little daily details of life in the home, that it is difficult to see what other body of opinion could be found mighty enough to resist it.
If, unhappily, this advance should not be made—if our present Western civilisation be allowed to run unchecked down the groove into which it has sunk—there seems nothing before it but destruction.