uffrage can. It is merely an act of justice and a reasonable
condition of social hygiene.

The attainment of the suffrage, if it is a beginning and not an end,
will thus have a real and positive value in liberating the woman's
movement from a narrow and sterilizing phase of its course. In England,
especially, the woman's movement has in the past largely confined itself
to imitating men and to obtaining the same work and the same rights as
men. Putting the matter more broadly, it may be said that it has been
the aim of the woman's movement to secure woman's claims as a human
being rather than as woman. But that is only half the task of the
woman's movement, and perhaps not the most essential half. Women can
never be like men, any more than men can be like women. It is their
unlikeness which renders them indispensable to each other, and which
also makes it imperative that each sex should have its due share in
moulding the conditions of life. Woman's function in life can never be
the same as man's, if only because women are the mothers of the race.
That is the point, the only point, at which women have an uncontested
supremacy over men. The most vital problem before our civilization
to-day is the problem of motherhood, the question of creating the human
beings best fitted for modern life, the practical realization of a sound
eugenics. Manouvrier, the distinguished anthropologist, who carries
feminism to its extreme point in the scientific sphere, yet recognizes
the fundamental fact that "a woman's part is to make children." But he
clearly perceives also that "in all its extent and all its consequences
that part is not surpassed in importance, in difficulty, or in dignity,
by the man's part." On the contrary it is a part which needs "an amount
of intelligence incontestably superior, and by far, to that required by
most masculine occupations."[58] We are here at the core of the woman's
movement. And the full fruition of that movement means that women, by
virtue of their supremacy in this matter, shall take their proper share
in legislation for life, not as mere sexless human beings, but as women,
and in accordance with the essential laws of their own nature as women.

II

There is a further question. Is it possible to discern the actual
embodiment of this new phase of the woman movement? I think it is.

To those who are accustomed to watch the emotional pulse of mankind,
nothing has seemed so remarkable during recent ye