FEMALE GOVERNMENT 



college for men), and our daughter returns from Europe 

 to go to (naming a college for women). Our only other 

 child is married. Our home will be empty. We will 

 go abroad." Thus the wealthy parent is not exempt 

 from the necessity of committing his children to society 

 to educate and train for future citizenship. 



So it is in all higher education classical, scientific, 

 mechanical, professional, military, and naval. Or- 

 ganized society becomes, and must become, a nursing 

 mother to the youth from whom, for the most part, her 

 future rulers and most useful servants must come. As 

 for the young waifs of society the flotsam and jetsam 

 of child-life, continually tossed amid the wreckage of the 

 world's great social sea long since government has seen, 

 and sees it more and more, that they are in an especial 

 sense the children of the State, and must be adopted 

 and trained into citizenship by the State. Thus far, at 

 least, our commonwealths are swayed by theories and 

 have taken up practices long ago prevalent in ant 

 communes. 



Unhappily, our system breaks down where that of the 

 ants proves splendidly effective: by our absence of 

 system in providing work for young citizens as soon as 

 their working powers are mature. In the ant commune 

 every individual passes at once from pupahood to the 

 status of a laborer. In a human community the 

 citizen's work, in both fact and form, is left chiefly at 

 haphazard. It must, indeed, be that with us, as with 

 hymenopters, the Spirit of the Commune has some subtle 

 potency in directing unconscious youth to the choice of 

 occupations and keeping the working mass in activity. 

 But the State as a State eschews the matter, and there 

 is no sense of communal responsibility that every citizen 



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