nism has less vitality than the
female organism. When both sexes at any age are subjected to the same
injurious influences, more males than females die. Thus all our work
with such a measure as the Children Act, keeping children out of
public-houses, and so forth, directly serves the womanhood of the not
distant future by preserving a certain amount of manhood to keep it
company. Accepting the truth of the dictum that it is not good for man
to be alone, we have to learn the still more general and profound truth
that it is not good for woman to be alone, and, as we now learn, the
modern movement for the care of childhood has this notable consequence,
which I have been pointing out for many years and now insist upon once
again, that it makes for the greater numerical equality of the sexes in
adult life, and therefore for the relief of the many evils near and
remote which flow from the numerical excess of women. Answering the
question, "Whither are we tending?" in Christmas, 1909, Mr. G. K.
Chesterton referred to our liability to "float feebly towards every
sociological fad or novelty until we believe in some plain, cold, crude
insanity, such as keeping children out of public-houses."[16]
Considering the authority, I think this is fairly good testimony toward
the wisdom of the achievement to which some of us devoted the greater
part of three strenuous years; and if the question is to be asked
"whither are we tending," part of the answer will be that by such
measures as this for the care of child life, which means in practice
especially for the keeping alive of boys, we are tending toward the
correction of one of the gravest, though least recognized, evils of the
present day.

Our business in the present volume is not with childhood. It is not
possible to go fully into the statistical details of the comparative
death-rate of the sexes, but the data can readily be obtained by any
interested reader.[17]

It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign
to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of
women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of
marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt
with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped
the notice of previous students.

Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in
war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem,