arents and offspring, carried on under existing social conditions, is
largely the result of ignorance, largely of religious or other
superstition. A more developed social state would not be possible at all
unless the social instincts were strong enough to check the reckless
multiplication of offspring. Richardson and others appear to advocate
the special cultivation of a class of non-childbearing women. Certainly
no woman who freely chose should be debarred from belonging to such a
class. But reproduction is the end and aim of all life everywhere, and
in order to live a humanly complete life, every healthy woman should
have, not sexual relationships only, but the exercise at least once in
her life of the supreme function of maternity, and the possession of
those experiences which only maternity can give. That unquestionably is
the claim of natural and reasonable living in the social state towards
which we are moving.

To deal with the social organization of the future would be to pass
beyond the limits that I have here set myself, and to touch on matters
of which it is impossible to speak with certainty. The new culture of
women, in the light and the open air, will doubtless solve many matters
which now are dark to us. Morgan supposed that it was in some measure
the failure of the Greeks and Romans to develop their womanhood which
brought the speedy downfall of classic civilization. The women of the
future will help to renew art and science as well as life. They will do
more even than this, for the destiny of the race rests with women. "I
have sometimes thought," Whitman wrote in his _Democratic Vistas_, "that
the sole avenue and means to a reconstructed society depended primarily
on a new birth, elevation, expansion, invigoration of women." That
intuition is not without a sound basis, and if a great historical
movement called for justification here would be enough.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] This chapter was written so long ago as 1888, and published in the
_Westminster Review_ in the following year. I have pleasure in here
including it exactly as it was originally written, not only because it
has its proper place in the present volume, but because it may be
regarded as a programme which I have since elaborated in numerous
volumes. The original first section has, however, been omitted, as it
embodied a statement of the matriarchal theory which, in view of the
difficulty of the subject and the wide differences of opinion abo