And yet that her very disabilities have served for her increasing protection is shown by the fact of her increasing protection as, with the evolution of her higher organisation, her disabilities have intensified.
Civilised woman, with her more delicate organisation, is far more defenceless than was savage woman. But in response to the claims of her increasing defencelessness, the instinctive chivalry of the stronger male, her natural protector, has become progressively the intelligent and moral chivalry of higher man. No strength or capability of woman's own to defend herself could so have served her; nor could so have served the other sex for fine incentive.
To free woman of her highly specialised and inspiring disabilities by substituting in her, powers, muscular and mental, that would fit her to meet the male on equal terms, would be to frustrate the method of the male evolutionary ascent, by eliminating the humanising and uplifting appeal to his manhood of these her inspiring unfitnesses.
The deplorable decadence in masculine regard for and bearing toward women, which has resulted in direct proportion as the sex has substituted male efficiencies for womanly ineptitudes, serves for one of many other valuable object-lessons of the War.
VI
Among other Feminist fallacies, the demi-mondaine has come to be regarded as victim merely, on the one hand, of an unjust, man-administered economic system, on the other, of masculine libertinism. The truth is that the vast majority of immoral women are under no compulsion, but voluntarily adopt this mode of life either to escape work, or because of a natural vicious proclivity. A number are mental defectives; some actually feeble-minded, others only morally deficient.
It must always be remembered, moreover, that, biologically speaking, the separation of the genus woman into the folds, respectively, of sheep and goats is of signal racial and social service. That some goats are in the sheep-fold, some lambs among the goats, is not to be denied. Fatalities, injustices, and incongruities are inevitable to all broad human classifications. In the main, however, the women who resist temptation and remain virtuous are obviously better fitted to be the wives and mothers of the Race than are they who fall.
And although this is not, of course, the calculated purpose of this lamentable under-world, the rough division of the sex thereby into two main classes has been of service, by supplying a sociological backwater wherein the worst of our racial derelicts—mental and moral defectives—are segregated; and are precluded, for the most part, from perpetuating their mental and moral defectiveness.
Women, like men, must uphold and battle for their standards in the teeth of circumstance. The most notable types of parasite-women, selfish, slothful, worthless, venal, vicious, whose standards are jewels and clothes, their goals luxury and pleasure and the evasion of all that is difficult and distasteful in life, are found among the aristocratic and the plutocratic orders; safely secured against economic necessity or lack of scope and outlet for their powers.