and
that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly
disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that
the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also.
As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are
largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large
number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual
servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely
picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding
hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly
not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they
leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for
the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the
morrow.

If other needs were not so pressing, one might well devote an entire
volume, not inappropriately in these days of fiscal controversy, to the
question of vital imports and exports. Year after year passes, and
politicians in Great Britain grow more and more voracious and, if
possible, less and less veracious on the subject of what they
misunderstand by imports and exports. The subject is really one for
knowledge, not for politicians. With great ceremony at intervals, they
go through the highly superfluous performance of calling each other
liars, as who should say that Queen Anne is dead: and while this
tragical farce continues the question of vital imports and exports is
ignored. Within it there lies the key to the Irish question, for
instance, since no nation can be saved which persistently exports the
best of its life. And in this question also lies the key to a great part
of the woman question and to a great part of the colonial question.
Politicians who have not even discovered yet that trade is a process of
exchange, and who assume that in every bargain someone is being worsted,
pay no heed to the questions what sort of people leave our shores, and
what sort of people enter them. Or rather, as if in order to emphasize
their blindness to fundamentals, they make a point about passing an act
against alien immigration, which merely serves to throw into prominence
our national neglect of this great issue. This is not the time and the
place in which I can deal with it in its entirety, but it must be
referred to in so far as it bears on the proportion of the sexes. Toward
the end of 1909 th