he right to be kingly men"; and I
would add that the divine right of women is the right to be queenly
women. Until this present time, it was never yet alleged as a final
principle of justice that whatever people wanted they were entitled to,
yet that is the simple feminist demand in a very large number of cases.
It is a demand to be denied, whilst at the same time we grant the right
of every man and of every woman to opportunities for the best
development of the self; whatever that self may be--including even the
aberrant and epicene self of those imperfectly constituted women whose
adherence to the woman's cause so seriously handicaps it.

But it is one thing to say people should have what is best for them, and
another that whatever they want is best for them. If it is not best for
them it is not right, any more than if they were children asking for
more green apples. Women have great needs of which they are at present
unjustly deprived; and they are fully entitled to ask for everything
which is needed for the satisfaction of those needs; but nothing is more
certain than that, at present, many of them do not know what they should
ask for. Not to know what is good for us is a common human failing; to
have it pointed out is always tiresome, and to have this pointed out to
women by any man is intolerable. But the question is not whether a man
points it out, presuming to tell women what is good for them, but
whether in this matter he is right--in common with the overwhelming
multitude of the dead of both sexes.

As has been hinted, the issue is much more momentous than any could have
realized even so late as fifty years ago. It is only in our own time
that we are learning the measure of the natural differences between
individuals, it is only lately that we have come to see that races
cannot rise by the transmission of acquired characters from parents to
offspring, since such transmission does not occur, and it is only within
the last few years that the relative potency of heredity over education,
of nature over nurture, has been demonstrated. Not one in thousands
knows how cogent this demonstration is, nor how absolutely conclusive is
the case for the eugenic principle in the light of our modern knowledge.
At whatever cost, we see, who have ascertained the facts, that we must
be eugenic.

This argument was set forth in full in the predecessors of this book,
which in its turn is devoted to the interests of women as indivi