more or less deficient. A ready capacity for acquisition of knowledge, and skill in language, are important contributors to this result.
It would seem, then, that Nature has marked out very clearly the relative positions of the sexes of man. This relation is beneficial not only from a natural but also from a social standpoint. The sex affection or passion has the greatest influence in compelling evolution of unwilling lives, and of driving where nothing can lead. The best emotions are aroused in the man who finds a woman dependent on him for support, and the infant's breath will awake that woman to serious thought and exertion who never had a serious thought before. Nor is the mutual benefit confined to the earlier days of the relation. It has been said elsewhere:[1] "While the interests of the members of the same sex often bring them into collision with each other, those of opposite sex can not normally do so. While the contests of the members of the one sex are the active agent in evolution by rivalry and force, the relations of opposite sex furnish the inducement to progress offered by mutual admiration and pleasure. Among mankind the necessity of pleasing and of inspiring the respect of the opposite sex has a great deal to do with the becoming pleasant and respectable."
The functions of the sexes being, then, different in society, as in nature, the question arises. To what extent should they perform identical functions? This question is pressed upon us to-day, and demands have arisen that woman should compete with man in all the forms of human activity, and should even have a hand in the government, whether constitutional or monarchical. The object of the present essay is to enumerate a few practical points with reference to these questions.
So far as regards cultivation of the mind, there can be no doubt that women should have all the facilities that are open to men. As the mothers of the human race, they should be deprived of no opportunity for development. The education of girls should be pushed as far as is consistent with good health. Had the education of women been encouraged earlier in human history, the general intelligence of the species would have been at a higher point to-day.
The competition with men by women in the pursuit of a livelihood is a necessity wherever women so outnumber men that they can not all marry, and where polygamy is not practiced. It is compulsory, and questions of taste and feeling have to be put aside in considering it. And the same unbending necessity decides the pursuit in which woman fails and that in which she succeeds. In some she succeeds easily; in some she can never succeed.
- ↑ "The Forum," September, 1887, p. 53, "On the Object of Life."
