PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS. 269 



life of incessant struggle with nature and his fellows for food 

 and for life involves upon him, and the consequent necessity 

 of correspondingly utiHsing every opportunity of repose to 

 recruit and eke out the short and precarious life so. indispen- 

 sable to wife and weans, we shall see that this crude domestic 

 economy is the best, the most moral, and the most kindly attain- 

 able under the circumstances. Again, the traveller from town, 

 who thinks the agricultural labourer a greedy brute for eating 

 the morsel of bacon and leaving his wife and children only 

 the bread, does not see that by acting otherwise the total 

 ration would soon be still further lowered, by diminished earn- 

 ings, loss of employment, or loss of health. 



The actual relations of fisherman and fishwife, of the smallest 

 farmer and his wife, seem to us to give a truer as well as 

 a healthier picture of antique industrial society, than those we 

 find in current literature ; and if we admit that such life is 

 deficient in refinement (although, on all deeper grounds, from 

 religion to ballad poetry, we might even largely dispute this), 

 it has still much to teach in respect of simplicity and health. 



The old view of the subjection of women was not, in fact, 

 so much of tyranny as it seemed, but roughly tended to express 

 the average division of labour ; of course hardships were fre- 

 quent, but these have been exaggerated. The absolute ratifi- 

 cation of this by law and religion was merely of a piece with 

 the whole order of belief and practice, in which men crushed 

 themselves still more than their mates. Being absolute, how- 

 ever, such theories had to be overthrown, and the application 

 of the idea of equality, which had done such good service in 

 demolishing the established castes, was a natural and serviceable 

 one. We have above traced the development of this, however, 

 and it is now full time to re-emphasise, this time of course 

 with all scientific relativity instead of a dogmatic authority, the 

 biological factors of the case, and to suggest their possible 

 service in destroying the economic fallacies at present so pre- 

 valent, and still more towards reconstituting that complex and 

 sympathetic co-operation between the differentiated sexes in 

 and around which all progress past or future must depend. 

 Instead of men and women merely labouring to produce things 

 as the past economic theories insisted, or competing over the 

 distribution of them, as we at present think so important, a 

 further swing of economic theory will lead us round upon a 

 higher spiral to the direct organic facts. So it is not for the 



