ctively to live. Each
life is an adjustment of internal character to external conditions. A
garden that has been choked with weeds may remain flowerless for many
succeeding years, but dig that garden, and sleeping flowers, not known
to live within the memory of man, may spring to life. May it not be
that in the garden of woman's inheritance there are buried seeds,
lying dormant, which at the liberating touch of opportunity may
reawaken and assert themselves as forgotten flowers? Yes, to-day this
seems a practical fact that already is being accomplished, and not a
futile speculation. The re-birth of woman is no dream. At last she is
realising the arrest in her development that has followed the
acceptance of a position which forces her to be a parasite and a
prostitute.

Every one admits the differences of function that separate the female
from the male half of humankind. But to assume that the physical,
mental, and moral disabilities of women, of which we hear so much, are
a necessary part of their inheritance--the debt they pay for being the
mothers of the race--is an absurdity it would be difficult to explain
except for that strange sex bias, which seems always to colour all
opinions as to women, their character and their place in society.
Havelock Ellis, who in his admirable work _Man and Woman_ has made an
exhaustive examination of all the known facts with regard to the real
and supposed secondary sexual differences between women and men, comes
to this conclusion in his final summary--

"We have not succeeded," he says, "in determining the radical
and essential character of men and women uninfluenced by
external modifying conditions. We have to recognise that our
present knowledge cannot tell us what they might be, but what
they actually are, under the conditions of civilisation.... The
facts are so numerous that even when we have ascertained the
precise significance of some one fact, we cannot be sure that it
is not contradicted by other facts. And so many of the facts are
modifiable under a changing environment that in the absence of
experience we cannot pronounce definitely regarding the
behaviour of either the male or female organism under different
conditions."

Only a knowledge of the multifarious and complex environmental forces,
which in the past have moulded women into what to-day they are, will
lead us to our goal. We may examine woman's present character,