breeding...."

Mr. Manning, to whom he was delivering this discourse, switched him on
to a new track by asking what he meant by "Neo-European."

"It's a bad phrase," said Mr. Britling. "I'll withdraw it. Let me try
and state exactly what I have in mind. I mean something that is coming
up in America and here and the Scandinavian countries and Russia, a new
culture, an escape from the Levantine religion and the Catholic culture
that came to us from the Mediterranean. Let me drop Neo-European; let me
say Northern. We are Northerners. The key, the heart, the nucleus and
essence of every culture is its conception of the relations of men and
women; and this new culture tends to diminish the specialisation of
women as women, to let them out from the cell of the home into common
citizenship with men. It's a new culture, still in process of
development, which will make men more social and co-operative and women
bolder, swifter, more responsible and less cloistered. It minimises
instead of exaggerating the importance of sex....

"And," said Mr. Britling, in very much the tones in which a preacher
might say "Sixthly," "it is just all this Northern tendency that this
world struggle is going to release. This war is pounding through Europe,
smashing up homes, dispersing and mixing homes, setting Madame Van der
Pant playing hockey, and André climbing trees with my young ruffians; it
is killing young men by the million, altering the proportions of the
sexes for a generation, bringing women into business and office and
industry, destroying the accumulated wealth that kept so many of them in
refined idleness, flooding the world with strange doubts and novel
ideas...."