re descent is a notion no longer
favoured. I believe that young mothers sometimes, before parting with
their children, impress upon them some indelible mark by which it may
be possible hereafter to recognise them; but such recognitions seldom
occur. Maternal affection is discountenanced as a purely animal
instinct, a survival from a lower grade of organisation, and does not
generally outlast a ten years' separation; while paternal love is
utterly scouted as an absurdity to which even the higher animals are
not subject. Boys are kept in the public establishments until the age
of twelve, those from ten to twelve being separated from the younger
ones and passing through the higher education in separate colleges.
The girls are educated apart till they complete their tenth year, and
are almost invariably married in the course of the next. At first,
under the influence of the theory of sexual equality, both received
their intellectual instruction in the same classes and passed through
the same examinations. Separation was soon found necessary; but still
girls passed through the same intellectual training as their brothers.
Experience, however, showed that this would not answer. Those girls
who distinguished themselves in the examinations were, with scarcely
an exception, found unattractive as wives and unfit to be mothers. A
very much larger number, a number increasing in every generation,
suffered unmistakably from the severity of the mental discipline to
which they were subjected. The advocates of female equality made a
very hard fight for equal culture; but the physical consequences were
perfectly clear and perfectly intolerable. When a point was reached at
which one half the girls of each generation were rendered invalids for
life, and the other half protected only by a dense stupidity or
volatile idleness which no school punishments could overcome, the
Equalists were driven from one untenable point to another, and forced
at last to demand a reduction of the masculine standard of education
to the level of feminine capacities. Upon this ground they took their
last stand, and were hopelessly beaten. The reaction was so complete
that for the last two hundred and forty generations, the standard of
female education has been lowered to that which by general confession
ordinary female brains can stand without injury to the physique. The
practical consequences of sexual equality have re-established in a
more absolute form than eve