ath with his club and his oaths is fast passing, and the
day of David with his harp and skilfully constructed sling is coming
near and yet nearer.

The qualities which give an animal, a race, or an individual, a higher
utility or social dominance must always be influenced by any change in
the environment. As the wheel of life slowly revolves, that which was
lowest comes continually uppermost, and that which was dominant becomes
subservient.

It is possible, that women, after countless ages, during which that
smaller relative development in weight and muscularity which is incident
to almost all females which suckle their young, and that lesser desire
for pugilism inherent in almost all females who bear their young alive,
rendered her lacking in the two qualities which made for individual
dominance in her societies, may yet, in the future, discover that those
changes in human conditions, which have done away with the primary
necessity for muscular force and pugilistic arts, have also inverted her
place in the scale of social values.

It is possible, that the human female, like the Jew, the male of that
type farthest removed from the dominant male type of the past, may in
the future find, that, so far from those qualities which, in an earlier
condition, lessened her social value and power of labour, continuing to
do so, they will increase it. That the delicacy of hand, lightness of
structure which were fatal when the dominant labour of life was to
wield a battle-axe or move a weight, may be no restraint but even an
assistance in the intellectual and more delicate mechanical fields of
labour; that the preponderance of nervous and cerebral over muscular
material, and the tendency towards preservative and creative activity
over pugilistic and destructive, so far from shutting her off from the
most important fields of human toil, may increase her fitness for them!
We have no certain proof that it is so at present; but, if woman's
long years of servitude and physical subjection, and her experience as
child-bearer and protector of infancy, should, in any way, be found
in the future to have endowed her, as a kind of secondary sexual
characteristic, with any additional strength of social instinct,
with any exceptional width of human sympathy and any instinctive
comprehension; then, it is not merely possible, but certain, that, in
the ages that are coming, in which the labour of the human race will be
not mainly destructive but