o be realized for the good of both sexes
in the present and the future.

Nature gives us more than a fair start, almost as if she knew that the
wastage of male life is apt to be higher at all ages even under the best
conditions. She sends more male children into the world, as if to
secure, on the whole, an equality of the sexes in adult life. That ideal
is realizable, even allowing for a considerable excess of male deaths.
One of our duties, then, is to control that part of the male death-rate,
if any, which is controllable. To begin at the beginning, we find that
infant mortality claims our attention at once. For years past in the
campaign against infant mortality I have urged this as an apparently
somewhat remote, yet very real and important issue. Infant mortality
bears heaviest upon male babies. It is largely, as I have so often said,
a male infanticide, notably contrasting with the practice of deliberate
female infanticide which is known in so many times and places. In
lowering the infant mortality we shall reduce this disproportion of male
deaths, and shall make for the survival of a larger number of men. Bring
down the infant mortality to proper limits and we shall have in adult
life possible male partners for a large number of women who are now
without such because of the male infanticide of twenty and thirty years
ago.

It is characteristic of the fashion in which the surface gains our
attention while the substance evades it, that the question of the
disproportion of the sexes should have been brought to the public notice
in regard to a subject which, though not unimportant, is quite secondary
compared with those which we are now discussing. Only three or four
years ago people were startled and incredulous when one told them by the
pen or in lectures that there was a very great excess of women in these
islands. Nowadays everybody knows it. This is not because people have
suddenly come to realize the fundamental importance for the State of
such matters, but simply because the fact provides an argument regarding
Woman Suffrage. This immensely important fact of female preponderance,
with its gigantic consequences, which affect every aspect of the
national life, was totally ignored by the public until, forsooth, it
became an argument against Woman Suffrage; and then the foolish people
whose voices are allowed to be heard on these complicated matters, but
who would be laughed out of court if they expressed their op