242 The Ideal State 



element was primarily an excrescence, a superfluity, 

 a waste product of Nature.' In sociology and ethics 

 we hear that ' man-made social order has its founda- 

 tions laid in ruined souls and bodies ; that mono- 

 gamous marriage is monotonous ; that morals are 

 based as much upon convention as principle ; that sex 

 war is a necessary and desirable stage to sex peace.' " 

 We are assured that a woman wrote the Odyssey ; 

 that Priscilla is accredited with the composition of the 

 Epistle to the Hebrews ; that Adam was made of dust, 

 and to dust shall return, but that Eve was not ; that 

 " we have even now a new revelation, and the name of 

 its Messiah is Woman," and " the cause for which men 

 have been torturing Mrs. Pankhurst is the same cause 

 for which Jesus Christ died." Miss Godden concludes : 

 " A mental condition which has been educated into 

 accepting these statements is precisely that condition 

 which confounds hammers with argument and suicide 

 with martyrdom. ... It is a condition bred and 

 fostered by the suffrage literature freely on sale at 

 suffrage shops, and the suffrage teaching sedulously 

 diffused from platforms, in drawing-rooms, at street 

 corners. ... It makes an immediate and public 

 dissociation from the promoters and disseminators of 

 these doctrines incumbent on every man and woman 

 who has at heart the honour and sanity of English 

 womanhood." 



It is significant of much that in the weekly edition 

 of the " Times " newspaper containing the above, there 

 is an article on the increase of lunacy, as evidenced by 

 the Sixty-sixth Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy 

 to the Lord Chancellor, which has been issued as a 

 Blue book. We find it there stated by Dr. Motts : 

 " In the offspring of insane parents, daughters are 

 much more numerous than sons, viz. in the proportion 

 of 292 to 208. These figures show that the female sex 



