Pioneered by strenuous, middle-aged women—with the best intentions, be it said—Feminists have adopted the fatal policy of sternly impressing the model of their own quasi-masculine middle-age as the standard of youthful development. Without, for a moment, suspecting that such wresting of male energies and efficiencies from its young women-victims has inevitably entailed upon them degrees of that climacteric of womanhood which is the herald of decline. On the contrary, this middle-aged, quasi-masculine state, because of its release of power for sterner purposes, has been hailed as a triumph of Emancipation and of higher education; proof positive that woman is not man—only because she has lacked opportunity to become so.
In point of fact, these unfortunate young creatures have been, and are being all the while ever further despoiled of their youth, of their sex, and their fair heritage of life and happiness, of function and of faculty. And the Race has been robbed of priceless living wealth in human health and capability.
The breasts of these despoiled have shrunk, in place of blossoming. There are no founts of altruistic life in them. Never will they be capable of nurturing babes, or of contributing their mysterious due to psychical attribute. The pelvis remains narrow and puerile. Never can it serve as hostel for a babe of normal, healthful type.
In the vast majority of modern girls and women, the reproductive organs are structurally immature or functionally defective.
Dr. Gaillard Thomas, an eminent American gynæcologist, estimated, some years since, that only about 4 per cent. of American women proper were physiologically fitted to become wives and mothers.
The United States have been and are all the while deriving fresh influx of vigour and vitality in stock, from the continuous immigration of simpler and more vitalised peoples. But American women proper have never recovered from the strain and hardships of adaptation to a new environment, which settlers in alien and undeveloped countries necessarily encounter; the deteriorative influences whereof are shown in constitutional impoverishment of the parent-stock. This is true, as well, of our Colonial kin. Not only the strain of acclimatisation, but too the hard and rough life-conditions women have to cope with in undeveloped lands are responsible for the constitutionally-debilitated, or, on the other hand, for the rawer and less highly-organised racial types found in new settlements.
In the United States, moreover, the standards of culture and of training are pre-eminently artificial. Democratic sentiment and material prosperity induce persons of working-class biological organisation to over-tax their children's brains and constitutions by forcing these to the educational standards and culture of stock that has evolved, by generations of higher nurture, to higher evolutionary grades. The "newly-rich," eager for their families to profit (as they regard it) by opportunities denied themselves, invariably commit this radical error of over-estimating academic education and social accomplishment. They fail to realise that one can no more attain culture than one can acquire breeding in a single generation. It takes three generations of culture—of comparative ease and freedom from the strain of industrial labour and living—to evolve the crude muscular arm of a working woman into the shapely, refined arm of a gentlewoman. And so it must be with brains. In nineteen cases out of twenty, a 'Varsity education serves as irreparable injury rather than as benefit to a working-class youth, depleting health or warping character as it inevitably does.
The strain of living above the evolutionary level is exhaustive and harmful, physically and mentally, both to individuals and to stock. The prudence of apportioning education to the grade of evolutionary development is strikingly shown in the cases of negroes, who, when over-taxed by the education normal to white races, not seldom become blind or consumptive. And always the morale deteriorates. The forcing upon our own labouring-classes of an education above that suited to their natural powers has contributed largely to the constitutional deterioration and the neurasthenia common among them to-day.
One of the factors of modern Labour-unrest, indeed, is the physical unfitness of debilitated and neurotic working-men to cope capably and cheerfully with the tasks of earlier and sturdier generations.
The urgent need of all our over-civilised races is not more education but more native faculty.