writers on women, supported by some women writers, during the last two hundred years, would fill a volume. They were more or less intelligible, and certainly entertaining, in the earlier part of the modern period, but at a time when we have scientific and historical information to guide us they are neither intelligent nor amusing. We now know that there is no such thing as an unchangeable nature of a living organism. Structure and function vary with use and environment, whatever theory of heredity one follows. Forbid the brain and muscles to function for some centuries, and they will become feebler: restore their activity and they will return to strength. Shut a woman out of politics or business or war, and she will lose her capacity for it: reintroduce her to it, and her faculties are sharpened. When the kings of Dahomi formed a regiment of women in their army, the women were found to be more deadly fighters than the men, and they drank as heavily.
As far as the political phase of the modern Feminist struggle is concerned, the application of these principles is clear enough. When statesmen can find no better argument against the enfranchisement of women than the fact that (like the politicians themselves) they do no military service, and when scientific men plead only their periodical perturbations and their “change of life,” it is time to cease arguing. Even in countries which have a system of conscription it has never been proposed that those who are exempt from
