“That government is best which governs least.”
“Give us natural opportunities and freedom.”
“A man has a right to do anything he pleases that does not interfere with the rights of others.”
Fortunately for us the working of natural law is that of the first creed; and our personally misguided conduct of affairs cannot wholly crush back the social growth belonging to our time.
In this connection it is important to note the influence of women, in their artificially restricted position, upon the world’s consumption, not only in economic fact, but in our inherited feeling and education on that subject.
Women, as we have repeatedly seen, were the first producers. Creative industry is theirs by the deepest laws of nature. The female is the original reproductive stream of life; and in the higher stages of her development she still manifests the larger range of race-activities. In the human species for by far the longest period of our life, the proto-social, she was the main—almost the sole—producer, men being mostly destroyers. But for the most of our historic period, all the time that is best known to us, women have been prevented from taking part in progressive human production and restricted to the duties of a house servant.
What tendency to specialised social service they might manifest was promptly banned as “unwomanly,” belonging only to men. The man elected himself to be sole producer, in the large social sense; and the woman was to be only a consumer, to depend on him for her maintenance and take what he gave her.
The position is acutely abnormal—quite opposite to the inherent nature of the female. It is her instinct to give—not to take; ably to do, not feebly to be done for.
This unnatural attitude was forced upon her, however, with two results, inevitable results, as regards consumption.
One is that all her flood of power and patience and infinite service being confined to her one master and their children, she has developed in them inordinate appetites and morbid tastes. The productive force that should flow broad and smooth in Society at large, being bottled up at home, with no consumer but the family, necessarily accustomed the family to receiving more than was good for it; thus maintaining in the world the ancient selfishness of the primitive individual, which real social life tends steadily to reduce. The social instincts, those large and outflowing feelings we call generosity, justice, altruism, are bred in the mutual service of specialised social industry; but the individual instincts, once virtues, now become vices if too prominent, are nursed and fed continually in that hotbed of all personal indulgence, the wife-served home.