DARWINISM AND POLITICS. Si 



the desired result. This is pre-eminently a 

 question which can only receive proper consider- 

 ation and solution when women are admitted 

 to full social and political responsibility. It is 

 the woman who bears the suffering of maternity 

 and has the care of the very young, and so the 

 woman is more immediately interested than the 

 man. So long as women were brought up to 

 believe that their sole or main function in life 

 was to bear children, and were made to feel that 

 there was something not only of disadvantage 

 but of disgrace in being unmarried or childless, 

 what wonder that population has been increased 

 indefinitely and recklessly ? Every inducement 

 was in that direction, the ideas of a military 

 society, the influence of the clergy (and, at 

 least in Protestant countries, their example 

 also), the employment of child-labour before 

 the factory acts, the system of our old poor law 

 everything encouraged the natural tendency 

 of the race to increase. With a change in the 

 prevalent sentiment, a change in fact will cer- 

 tainly follow. When women have other inter- 

 ests in the world than those of maternity, things 

 will not go on so blindly as before. And the 

 race need not necessarily surfer thereby, but 



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