ht the downfall of mediaeval Europe, and
whenever a splendid civilization springs up the curse of sex-bondage in
one form or another grows with it like a cancer."

"But medicine is learning to cure the cancer. Can't it help cure this?"

"We are getting near the cure for cancer, maybe near the cure for this
cancer as well. Sex-bondage was the great curse of negro slavery in
the United States; it was the thing which brought misery on the South,
in the carpet-bag days, as a retribution for the sins of the fathers.
We cured that and the South is bigger and better for that terrible
surgical operation than it ever was before. But this latest
development--organized capture of ignorant, weak, pretty girls, to be
held in slavery by one man or by a band of men and a few debauched old
hags, is comparatively a new thing in America. It has been caused by
the swarms of ignorant emigrants, by the demand of the lowest classes
of those emigrants and the Americans they influence for a satisfaction
of their lust. It is made easy by the crass ignorance of the country
girls, the emigrant girls, and by the drudgery and misery of the
working girls in the big cities."

"I saw two cases in Night Court, Doc, which explained a whole lot to
me--drunken fathers and brutal husbands who poisoned their own
wives--it taught that not all the blame rests upon the weakness of the
women."

"Of course it doesn't," exclaimed MacFarland impetuously. "It rests
upon Nature, and the way our boasted Society is mistreating Nature.
Woman is weaker than man when it comes to brute force; you know it is
force which does rule the world when you do get down to it, in
government, in property, in business, in education--it is all survival
of the strongest, not always of the fittest. A woman should be in the
home; she can raise babies, for which Nature intended her. She can
rule the world through her children, but when she gets out to fight
hand to hand with man in the work-world she is outclassed. She can't
stand the physical strain thirty days in the month; she can't stand the
starvation, the mistreatment, the battling that a man gets in the
world. She needs tenderness and care, for you know every normal woman
is a mother-to-be--and that is the most wonderful thing in the world,
the most beautiful. When the woman comes up against the stone wall of
competition with men her weakness asserts itself. That's why good
women fall. It's not the 'easiest way'--it