vigour, while his companion female
became stationary and inactive, taking no share in the labours of
society beyond the passive fulfilment of sexual functions, has always
been negated. It has ended as would end the experiment of a man
seeking to raise a breed of winning race-horses out of unexercised,
short-winded, knock-kneed mares. No, more disastrously! For while the
female animal transmits herself to her descendant only or mainly by
means of germinal inheritance, and through the influence she may
exert over it during gestation, the human female, by producing the
intellectual and moral atmosphere in which the early infant years
of life are passed, impresses herself far more indelibly on her
descendants. Only an able and labouring womanhood can permanently
produce an able and labouring manhood; only an effete and inactive male
can ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive womanhood. The
curled darling, scented and languid, with his drawl, his delicate
apparel, his devotion to the rarity and variety of his viands, whose
severest labour is the search after pleasure, and for whom even the
chase, which was for his remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toil
essential for the meat and life of his people, becomes a luxurious and
farcical amusement;--this male, whether found in the later Roman
Empire, the Turkish harem of today, or in our Northern civilisations, is
possible only because generations of parasitic women have preceded him.
More repulsive than the parasite female herself, because a yet further
product of decay, it is yet only the scent of his mother's boudoir that
we smell in his hair. He is like to the bald patches and rotten wool on
the back of a scabby sheep; which indeed indicate that, deep beneath the
surface, a parasite insect is eating its way into the flesh, but which
are not so much the cause of disease, as its final manifestation.

As we have said it is the power of the human female to impress
herself on her descendants, male and female, not only through germinal
inheritance, through influence during the period of gestation, but
above all by producing the mental atmosphere in which the impressionable
infant years of life are passed, which makes the condition of the
child-bearing female one of paramount interest of the race. It is this
fact which causes even prostitution (in many other respects the most
repulsive of all the forms of female parasitism which afflicts humanity)
to be, probably, no