From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in favour of a woman because she was a woman.
The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man who had invented a ship that could not sink.
There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman.
If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea?
The women who are with child.
And the men who are about to have ideas.
And the men who man the boats for them, who in God's name and in the name of a world protect its women who are with child, and its men who are about to have ideas.
The world is different from the Titanic. We do not need to line up our immortal fellow human beings, sort them out in a minute on a world and say to them, "Go here and die!" "Go there and live!" We are able to spend on a world at least an average of thirty-five years apiece on all these immortal human beings we are with, in seeing what they are like, in guessing on what they are for and on their relative value, and in deciding where they belong and what a world can do with them.
We ought to do better in saving people on a world. We have more time to think.
What would we try to do if we took the time to think? Would there be any way of fixing upon an order for saving people on a world? What would be the most noble, the most universal, the most Godlike and democratic schedule for souls to be saved on—on a world?