The world, and especially women, owe a debt of gratitude to a certain famous woman who, by her force of character; her defiant self-respect in the face of social criticism, because she had a child and no husband, has wrung from the unwilling public the highest place accorded any actress in this or any previous age. This artist's well-known reply to an openly expressed criticism of her is worthy of perpetuation. "Ah, so!" she said, "true I have a son and no husband, but you women have husbands and lovers, and no children!"
We would not have it understood that we commend this woman's example, and criticise that of the woman to whom she referred. We do not regard child-bearing as the end and aim of woman's mission. It has been said that the first duty of Man is to perpetuate the species, but observation should convince us that in all too many instances the first duty of the individual would be to refrain from such a crime against posterity.
We neither criticise nor advise the adoption of the position of a husbandless mother; nor that of the women who are childless wives. We endorse any woman's insistence upon her right to self-respect; and we insist that a better civilization cannot come without permitting the greatest degree of personal liberty in matters pertaining to the sex-relation, and, above and beyond all, without conceding to the unmarried mother the same respect that we accord to the married one, when she is otherwise worthy of our respect. It certainly takes courage for a defenseless woman to bear a fatherless child, in a hypocritical world.
The normal woman does not live who would not rather be safely and happily married to the man whom her soul tells her exists somewhere in the universe, than to be battling with the problem of existence, alone. When she is so married, we need not fear that the marriage will be disrupted. Until she is so married, no power on earth can, and no power in Heaven will, prevent the disruptions, although man's laws may temporarily obstruct the evidence of such disruption.
What we have already said will make it clear, that our contention is that affinities are not necessarily soul-mates; that, in fact, we may have many and various kinds of affinities, but no one can possibly have more than one soul-mate.
Mates are two entities composing a pair. They are the two halves that make a whole. Unlike what we know of affinities, they are not merely similar; nor yet opposite, so that they attract each other because of curiosity or dissimiliarity.
They belong to each other because together they complete a perfect balance. Each supplies in the exact proportion required for balance the qualities lacking in the other.
In the event of such union, instinctive procreation will cease, and re-generation will begin. They will consciously beget souls, instead of merely providing bodies for souls to manifest upon this external plane of consciousness.
Bodily contact is not essential to this phase of sex-union, because the real conjunction is between the interior natures; and the interior nature exists independently of the physical organism.
Already the race-thought is beginning to realize interiorly. This is manifest in the daily press; in music and drama; and in all the avenues of the senses. That intangible, elusive but potential thing called "character" forms the gist of editorial advice. Everywhere we note a tendency to look below the appearance of things, and to fathom the depths of psychological analysis. For the first time in centuries the race-thought seeks the underlying cause for specific effects, instead of, as heretofore, being satisfied to deal with effects only, suppressing those that are unpleasant and extolling those that seem agreeable.