Dr. Clarke’s work on Sex and Education made a great sensation because he pointed out that the ill-health of American women is largely due to the brain-work imposed on them at school. Now the superior beauty of American women is admittedly largely due to the intelligent animation of their features, to the early training of their mental faculties. Is this advantage to be sacrificed? Dr. Clarke’s argument does not point to any such conclusion. He simply contended that the methods of female education were injurious. “The law has, or had, a maxim that a man and his wife are one, and that the one is the man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys’ schools and girls’ schools are one, and that the one is the boys’ school.” Girls need different studies from boys to fit them for their sphere in life; and above all they need careful hygienic supervision and periods of rest.—Dr. Clarke’s book affords many irrefutable arguments in favour of one of the main theses of the present treatise: that the tendency of civilisation is to differentiate the sexes, mentally and physically. It is on this differentiation that the ardour and the cosmetic power of Romantic Love depend. Hence the hopelessness of the Virago Woman’s Rights Cause, especially in America, where the women are more thoroughly feminine than elsewhere. It is said that when the first female presidential candidate announced a lecture in a western town, not a single auditor appeared on the scene. American women, evidently, are in no immediate danger of becoming masculine and ceasing to inspire Love.

Women, however, must be educated and thoroughly, for it has been abundantly shown in the preceding pages that only an educated mind can feel true Romantic Love. But their education should be feminine. They need no algebra, Greek, and chemistry. What they need is first of all a thorough knowledge of Physiology and Hygiene, so that they may be able to take care of the Health and Beauty of their children. Then they should be well versed in literature, so as to be able to shine in conversation. Their artistic eye should be trained, to enable them to teach their children to go through the world with their eyes open. Most of us are half blind; we cannot describe accurately a single person or thing we see. Music should be taught to all women, as an aid in making home pleasant and refined, and as an antidote to care. Natural history is another useful feminine study which enlarges the sympathies by showing, for example, that birds love and marry almost as we do, wherefore it is barbarous to wear their stuffed bodies on one’s hat.

Education, Intermarriage, Hygiene, and Romantic Love will ultimately remove the last traces of the ape and the savage from the human countenance and figure. Climate will perhaps always continue to modify different races sufficiently to afford the advantages of cross-fertilisation or intermarriage. The remarkable fineness of the American complexion, for instance, has been ascribed to climatic influences, and with justice it seems, for, according to Schoolcraft, the skin of the native Indians is not only smoother, but more delicate and regularly furrowed than that of Europeans. The notion, however, that the climate is tending to make the American like the Indian in feature and form is nonsensical. The typical “Yankee” owes his high cheek-bones and lankness to his indigestible food; his thin colourless lips to his Puritan ancestry and lack of æsthetic culture.

Even if climate did possess the power to modify the forms of our features, it would not be allowed to have its own way where these modifications conflicted with the laws of Beauty. Science is daily making us more and more independent of crude and cruel Natural Selection, and of the advantages of physical conformity to our surroundings. Hence Sexual Selection has freer scope to modify the human race into harmony with æsthetic demands. Perhaps the time will come when the average man will have as refined a taste and as deep feelings as a few favoured individuals have at present; that epoch will be known as the age of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.

INDEX