74 EMAXCIPATIOX— BLACK AND WHITE in 



mothers will bring forth better sons, and the im- 

 petus gained by the one sex will be transmitted, in 

 the next generation, to the other. The most Dar- 

 winian of theorists will not venture to propound 

 the doctrine, that tlie physical disabilities under 

 which women have hitherto laboured in the strug- 

 gle for existence with men are likely to be re- 

 moved by even the most skilfully conducted pro- 

 cess of educational selection. 



We are, indeed, fully prepared to believe that 

 the bearing of children may, and ought to, become 

 as free from danger and long disability to the 

 civilised woman as it is to the savage; nor is it 

 improbable that, as society advances towards its 

 right organisation, motherhood will occupy a less 

 space of woman's life than ,it has hitherto done. 

 But still, unless the human species is to come to 

 an end altoc^ether — a consummation which can 

 hardly be desired by even the most ardent advo- 

 cate of " women's rights " — somebody must be 

 good enough to take the trouble and responsibility 

 of annually adding to the world exactly as many 

 people as die out of it. In consequence of some 

 domestic difficulties, Svdnev Smith is said to have 

 suggested that it would have been good for the 

 human race had the model offered by the hive 

 been followed, and had all the working part of the 

 female community been neuters. Failing any 

 thorough-going reform of this kind, we see noth- 

 ing for it but the old division of humanity into 



