PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS. 



247 



beyond the everyday average of the race. Whereas, admitting the 

 theory of evolution, we are not only entitled to the hope, but logically 

 compelled to the assurance, that these rare fruits of an apparently more 

 than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the race 

 have been privileged to gather, or it may be to see from distant 

 heights are yet the realities of a daily life toward which we and ours 

 may journey. 



IV. Intellectual and Emotional Differences Between the 

 Sexes. — We have seen that a deep difference in constitution expresses 

 itself in the distinctions between male and female, whether these be 

 physical or mental. The differences may be exaggerated or lessened, 

 but to obliterate them it would be necessary to have all the evolution 

 over again on a new basis. What was decided among the prehistoric 

 Protozoa can not be annulled by Act of Parliament. In this mere 

 outline we can not of course do more than indicate the relation of the 

 biological differences between the sexes to the resulting psychological 

 and social differentiations; for more than this neither space nor powers 

 suffice. We must insist upon the biological considerations underlying 

 the relation of the sexes, which have been too much discussed by 

 contemporary writers of all schools, as if the known facts of sex did 

 not exist at all, or almost as if these were a mere matter of muscular 

 strength or weight of brain. Even a recent discussion which is pro- 

 fessedly from the biological point of view, that of Mr. Romanes, 

 sorely disappoints us in this regard. 



The reader need not be reminded of the oldest and most traditional 

 views of the subjection of women inherited from the ancient European 

 order; still less perhaps of the attitude of the ordinary politician, who 

 supposes that the matter is one essentially to be settled by the giving 

 or withholding of the franchise. The exclusively political view of the 

 problem has in turn been to a large extent subordinated to that of 

 economic laissez /aire, from which of course it consistently appeared 

 that all things would be settled as soon as women were sufficiently 

 plunged into the competitive industrial struggle for their own daily 

 bread. While, as the complexly ruinous results of this intersexual 

 competition for subsistence upon both sexes and upon family life 

 have begun to become manifest, the more recent economic panacea of 

 redistribution of wealth has naturally been invoked, and we have 

 merely somehow to raise women's wages. 



All disputants have tolerably agreed in neglecting the historic, 

 and still more the biological factors; while, so far as the past evolu- 

 tion of the present state of things is taken into account at all, the 

 position of women is regarded as having simply been that in which 

 the stronger muscle and brain of man was able to place her. The 



