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position must not be based on arguments drawn from primitive sociology. Our learned German, had he read to the end of his own book, must have seen the refutation of his own theory. The Institution of the Man's House almost invariably breaks down. The doors, once so rigidly closed to all but the initiated man, open inch by inch. Gradually the Man's House alters in character, becomes more religious, the centre of a Secret Society to which woman begs or buys admission; it ends as a mere sanctuary or temple, or as a club-house whose tabus are less and less stringent, and whose last survivals are still precariously entrenched in the precincts of Pall Mall.
The institution of the Man's House was unquestionably an advance in civilisation; but what is good for a time is not therefore good for all time. The full reasons for its breakdown are too complex for discussion here, but one cause of inadequacy is clear. Good and useful though the Man's House was for man, it left out half of humanity, woman. It civilised man by releasing him from sex, or, rather, by balancing his sex instincts which gather round his home with his "herd" instincts, his comradeship which centred round the Man's House. But the solution was crude, and by segregation. Release was sought, as too often to-day, not by a wise ascetism, but by the banishment of temptation, by the seclusion of women within their sex. It is as noticeable to-day as then that the less self-restraint a man is prepared to exercise, the more rigorously will he insist that woman shall be secluded. It is only the man who has his passions well to heel who is prepared to grant liberty to woman. Man had, and, in part, still has yet to learn that one half of humanity cannot be fully humanised without the other.
